Sep 13, 2021 3 min read Tips

Search Strategy

One of the most basic power searching strategies that you can use is to search for phrases. You do this by placing quotation marks around words that you want to treat as a unit.

Search 1: Search as a phrase

One of the most basic power searching strategies that you can use is to search for phrases. You do this by placing quotation marks around words that you want to treat as a unit.

Exercise 1

Search the phrases "the story of the bull", "macbook pro 2015 15 inch” etc, and try more alike.

Search 2: Search within the title part of a website

Google has two ways to limit your search to words found in the title part of a website. That is intitle: and allintitle:. Notice that the commands intitle: and allintitle: are followed by a colon. When you use intitle: the first word or phrase (group of words enclosed in quotation marks) that follows this command will be located in the title part of the website. The other words may be in the title part of the website, but they do not have to be.

Exercise 2A:

If you want to find websites about "A Brief Look at Eesa" try this search: intitle:A Brief Look at Eesa

Exercise 2B:

Every word following the command must be located in the title part of the website when you use the command allintitle:, If you want to ensure that every word is located in the title part of the website, use allintitle:as in this search:
allintitle:A Brief Look at Eesa

This search ensures that all the words "A Brief Look at Eesa" are in the title part of the website.

Search 3: Eliminate commercial sites from the search results

The World Wide Web has a lot of commercial information, but commercial websites are often not very useful for school assignments. You can eliminate many commercial sites from your search results by adding -.com or -site:com at the end of your search results.

Exercise 3:

If you want to find information for a project about steroids and you want to eliminate all the commercial sales sites from your search results, try this search:
intitle:A Brief Look at Moosa -.com
OR
intitle:A Brief Look at Moosa -site:com

Search 4: Search for only educational sites

Sometimes it is often useful to restrict your search results to pages that come from educational institutions. Search results can be limited to Maldives educational institutions by adding edu.mv after your search terms.

Exercise 4A

The search intitle:"islamic studies" site:edu.mv locates websites about islamic studies that come from Maldives educational institutions.

Exercise 4B

Locate websites about quran that come from Maldives educational
institutions (.edu.mv). Make sure that the word quran is found in the title part of the website.

Search 5: Search within a URL

The URL is another section of a web page that is searchable.

Exercise 5A:

To locate a website about the duha prayer that appeared on islamqa, type the following search: "duha prayer" inurl:islamqa

Exercise 5B:

Now, find some websites about Advanced Quran Course. Be sure that the websites come from Maldives.

Search 6: Search for a particular file type

Google can search for many different types of files, including Adobe Acrobat files (pdf), PowerPoint (ppt), word documents (doc), etc.

Exercise 6:

A: To locate pdf documents about medical marijuana, try this search:
intitle:"stories of the prophets" filetype:pdf

Exercise 6B:

If you want to locate PowerPoint presentations about the same topic, you may also try this in google advance search (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) where you can refine you search as you wish.

Search 7: Searching for missing words using a wildcard

When an () is used within a phrase, the () finds characters or full words that could occupy the space between the words where it is placed.

Exercise 7A:

"abu * bilal philips" locates either Abu Philips, Abu Bilal Philips, or
Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips from the web page.

Exercise 7B:

Construct a similar search that will find websites about any person of your choice.

Search 8: Using Google News

Google News searches and indexes over thousands of news sources. Google keeps these news stories in a database for one month. This is an excellent free source for newspaper articles that are up to one month old.

Exercise 8:

If you want to find recent newspaper articles about Qatar, type: "qatar" in the Google News search bar.

Search 9: Google Image Search

Google has both an Image Search and an Advanced image Search. The Advanced Image Search allows you to be more specific in your image searching. You can search by image, size of image, color of image, and file types like jpg or gif.

Exercise 9A:

Search for an image of a book that is about The Journey to Allah, which has a blue cover and a wheel on it.

Exercise 9B:

Search images by an image.

Search 10: Google Scholar Search

Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including books, abstracts and articles.

Exercise 10:

Search for a topic such as games for kids

Search 11: Ebscohost Search

Visit http://search.ebscohost.com/

You will require a username and a password to login this site. Use the username and password obtained from the library.

Select ERIC, Academic Search Premier and click continue.

Exercise 11:

search for a topic such as second language acquisition. Try to limit your search to full text and academic journals only.