This section outlines how you can make your searching more accurate. It is taken from notes and lectures by Murray Dick.
You can download these notes as a pdf: newsgathering online
narrowing searches
You can tighten your search results using the following:
AND: (implicit)
OR: blair wmd OR weapons
NOT: rangers -qpr
phrase search: which is the “richest bank in the UK” (try with and without quotes).
Wildcard: Google doesn’t support the wildcard in the way it is conventionally used in other search engines – MSN, Yahoo or Exalead – it uses automatic stemming.
Nevertheless, you can use a * in phrase-searching. Google treats the * as a placeholder for a word or more than one word, where you want to do an expansive search. For example, “corruption in the * industry” expert can help you find experts in corruption in different fields.
The plus sign (+) allows you to stop Google from stemming your words – if you are interested in a word in a particular case. It can also be applied to stop Google finding references to certain words that link to (rather than feature in) the pages you are searching from, when viewing cached content. Lastly, it can be applied to media sources, allowing you to search stories about a specific company in Google News.
Synonyms (~) for example: ~marriage will find references to love, marriage, romance etc.
It’s worth bearing in mind that other engines offer an even broader range of search operators. Exalead, for example, permits atleast and proximity searching. Their atleast function allows the searcher to find pages that feature a term prominently, which can be useful when you are searching for backgrounds on people or issues.
The proximity search function allows the searcher to find terms which occur close to each other, which can be useful when trying to unearth connections between people and events in the news.
the occurrences function: intitle:
This is used for finding reliable backgrounders, however, bear in mind that standards in metadata vary widely. Think about what is included in the professional sites’ web page titles. For example, if you want to find background information (analysis, not news, professional not amateur) about Somalia’s troubled political history:
Compare:
somalia crisis background
With:
somalia crisis intitle:Q&A
Instead of background you could try: depth, comment, analysis or brief.
You can search for this terms in the url using the following search:
inurl: Somalia analysis
searching through documents
By specifying the type of file you want to search within you can tighten your search even further. Financial information is more likely to be held in an excel spreadsheet that a web page, so limiting the search to within this type of file produces more accurate results:
Compare:
house prices Greenwich
With:
“house prices” greenwich 2007 filetype:xls
Also try switching format to Powerpoint (filetype:ppt) for finding experts – they are likely have demonstrated their expertise in presentations.
languages
You can also make use of the language selector in advanced search for article.
Compare:
scudetto “silvio berlusconi” (with and without filter switched to English).
links
This is how you find out who is linking to a site which can highlight bias, or partisanship. In Google advanced search go to ‘date, usage rights, numeric range’ and copy the url of the site you are checking where it says ‘find pages that link to the page’. Other useful tools for doing this are Back Link Watch and iwebtool.
You can find out more about searching for hidden documents elsewhere on this site.
Contributor Finding Online – Murray Dick – July 2009
useful links
Search Engine Watch
Provides data and ratings on the different search engines.
Startpage
Claims to be the world’s most private search engine as it does not record your IP address.
A9
Searches e-commerce websites
Internet Archive
Also known as the Wayback Machine, this is a digital library of web sites as they used to be.
Reseach clinic
Features links, tools and study material for professional researchers. The site accompanies courses delivered by the BBC’s Internet research specialist, Paul Myers.