Search is all about someone else’s language. Think about how somebody else would write about the topic You’ve got to think about equivalent terms.” Part of the skill here is being fascinated about language. That will search for the phrase “San Antonio” on web pages that don’t have the word “Alamo.” There’s no space between Alamo and the hyphen. So if you’re visiting San Antonio but don’t want to visit the Alamo, type: Instead, type a minus sign in front of the word. Typing “Smith denied” OR “Smith claimed” OR “Smith argued” will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith.Īvoid using NOT if you want to exclude a search term.
OR is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Most of what you know about Boolean is wrongĭon’t bother typing AND in your search queries – Google treats it like any other word.īut OR in all caps actually works. Some of these techniques are powerful but obscure others are well-known but not fully understood by everyone. Here are some of my favorite tips shared by Russell at the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. But it’s not often you get to hear advice directly from someone at Google who offers you his favorite search tools, methods and perspectives to help you find the impossible. There are plenty of Google search cheat sheets floating around. “Once you know these tricks, you can solve problems that look impossible,” Russell said.
#Google boolean search cheat sheet series
Yet in a few minutes, Russell, a research scientist at Google, revealed the answer by paying attention to small details and walking us through a series of smart Google searches. Nothing in that office was even in the photo. He wanted the phone number of the precise office where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken. He wasn’t asking for a phone number for the skyscraper in the picture, which sounds hard enough.
What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped? Daniel Russell stood in front of a crowd of investigative journalists in Boston last week and showed us this picture of a random skyscraper in an unknown city:
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