How to Improve Search Results on Google

Pew Research recently reported that 92% of adults use search engines daily and ComScore recently reported that 65.6% of all US searches are conducted on Google. So I thought I would pass along Hack College's recommendations about how to "Get More Out of Google." Here are some search pointers that may improve your use of Google:

WHAT YOU WANT: NY Times articles about Ponzi schemes and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, but not Picard, written between 2000 and 2011.
GOOGLE SEARCH#1: site:nytimes.com ~ponzi "SIPC" -Picard 2000..2011
EXPLANATION OF SEARCH:
site: searches pages of that site only
~ will search related words such as 'fraud' and 'scheme'
" " search for the exact phrase not each of the words separately in this example the SIPC is the Securities Investor Protection Corporation
- excludes this term from search in this example Irving Picard (Bernie Madoff Bankruptcy Trustee)
.. date range shows all results with the designated time range

WHAT YOU WANT: A pdf report about discovery of documents with ESI (Electronically Stored Information) in the title.
GOOGLE SEARCH#2: filetype:pdf discovery intitle:ESI of *documents
EXPLANATION OF SEARCH:
filetype: searches only results of the file type you designate such as pdf, doc, jpg, etc
intitle: only shows results with that word in the title
* replaces itself with common terms in your search (in this case any kind of document whether paper or electronic)

Try these searches on Bing and Yahoo!, but you'll see that they don't work the same.

Please let me know if pointers help your use of Google.

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