General Tips

Since Google only returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. This new query will return a specific subset of the pages returned by your original "too-broad" query.

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to avoid. (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.)

For example, the search

will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music".

With Google, you can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") will appear together in all returned documents (unless they are stop words, special common words that require a "+" sign -- see our Google's search basics page for details). Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes; for example, mother-in-law is treated as a phrase even if the three words aren't in quotes.

The Google directory (located at directory.google.com) provides a convenient way to refine your search based on a particular topic. For example, searching for "Saturn" within the Science > Astronomy category of the Google directory returns only pages about Saturn the planet. It does not return pages about Saturn the car, Saturn the game system, or any other meanings of the term.

Searching within a category of interest allows you to quickly narrow in on only the most relevant pages to you.

Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meaning to Google. One such word for Google is the "site:" operator. To search a specific domain or site, use the "site:sampledomain.com" syntax in the Google search box.

For example, to find admission information on Stanford's site, enter:

Often, simply adding more words to a broad query can help narrow it until you find what you want. However, Google also provides a variety of search features that let you

• restrict your search to pages within a given website
• exclude pages from a particular web site
• restrict your search to pages only in a given language
• find all the pages that link to a given web page
• find pages that are related to a given web page