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Refining your search

When you do a Google search you get results from all  types of domains including .com, .org, .gov and .edu. Often that works out well since Google does a pretty good job of showing you what it considers relevant results, but sometimes you might want to refine your search. But Search operators can help you limit your searches to make them more relevant or get higher quality results.  

You can use them to find information from a specific site or a specific type of site such as .edu, .gov or .com. You can also use a search operator to avoid information from a certain site or type of site.

Let’s say you wanted to find something that about cyberbullying from ConnectSafely’s website. One way to do that is to use the site operator by typing cyberbullying site:connectsafely.org. Notice that there is no space between site: and the site name.

But you could widen the search to, perhaps government sites but typing cyberbullying site:.gov and the only information you’d see is from government sites. You could do the same with .edu for education sites, .org for nonprofit organization (though not all .org sites are non-profit) or any other top level domain. For example, if you wanted to find cyberbullying information from Canadian sites you could type cyberbullying site:.ca.

As Google shows in its Refine web searches page, there are several other types of operators such as putting a – in front of a word to leave it out of a search. For example musk -elon will find references to the musk but not the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. If you’re looking for an exact match, put it in quotes such as “strawberry soda.”  If you’re shopping for something within a price range, you can put in the range of prices with .. in the middle like bicycle $700..$900.

There are other search operators that you can read about in The Complete Guide To Google Search Operators from Indeed.com.

 

 

 


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