Data Mining on the Internet with Google
Expand your power of Google.
Google (and many other search engines) has the ability not only to search on keywords, but also using a more “database-ish” query language to really narrow down your search results. The following is a summary of a few of the most useful lesser known features.
Helpful tips include:
- To include phrases quote the words together (straight quotes). For instance, “Bill Clinton” returns results as most expect whereas a search for Bill Clinton will return pages with the two words anywhere in the resultant page.
- To exclude words in a search, prefix the word or phrase with a minus sign (-).
- To restrict a search to a specific domain such as UCLA, use the modifier inurl: (thus, for UCLA append inurl:ucla.edu to the search).
- If you prefer a form interface for advanced queries, click on "Settings" > "Advanced search" or go directly to https://www.google.com/advanced_search.
- Go in to "Settings" > "Search settings" to display more than ten results per page.
Here are some pages for crafting better searches.