This tip is provided by the Centre for Enhancing Learning through Technology (CELT).
Did you know that you can use a few techniques to make your Google searches more accurate? Limiting your searches can help to weed out the superfluous information and help you search like a professional – here’s a few examples:
Technique | Show me | Link to results |
Using “speech marks” we can tell Google to only return search results that contain the exact phrase with the words in the order they are typed. | ![]() |
Searching with speech marks |
Alternatively, if you want to search for a number of words but you don’t mind in what order they appear use the ‘+’ symbol. | ![]() |
Searching with the + sign |
Finally, if you know that you need to find a particular page or phrase on a specific website, use the site search tool. This will restrict Google to searching only within the specified website. | ![]() |
Search a specific website |
Click the links above to see how the three variations of the same search return different results.