SPCH 1315 | Public Speaking | Professor Cárdenas

You can perform a more effective search if you use an Advanced Google Search. There are two ways to do this. You can click on the tools menu in the top right corner of the Google homepage, and select Advanced Search from the list.

 

This will bring you to a blank form you can use to see all of your Advanced Search options in one place:

 

But you don't have to use the blank form. You can use Advanced Google techniques in a basic search field. Here are some of the best:

Search for words as a phrase.

Example: "Ronald Reagan"

 

Limit your search results to results from a specific webpage or domain (like .edu or .gov).

Example: site:.gov

 

Exclude terms from a your search results if you don't want information on a specific aspect of a topic.

Example: "mother teresa" -contraceptive

Search for words related to your search term.

Example: ~speech will also bring you results for rhetoric, oratory, etc.

Limit your results to a particular time range.

Example: 1980..1988

 

Fill in missing words with "wild card" searching.

Example: *speech will bring you results for "keynote speech" or "acceptance speech"

 

 

 

Look at the difference in our results. If we just do a search for 'Ronald Reagan speech,' we'll get over 11 million hits:

 

But if you use your Advanced Search techniques, you can limit that drastically. In this example, I am searching for the phrase "Ronald Reagan," with any variation on the word 'speech.' I am also limiting my search to results that mention anything that happened during Reagan's presidency (1980-1988), and I only want websites that end in the domain .gov. That gets me just over 16,000 hits:

 

If Chat is offline, you can email questions to reference.librarian@sjcd.edu