There have been a couple of good posts recently about cool Google tips and tricks. Bates InfoTip, an email newsletter, shares four Little-Known Google Tools. One of these is Simply Google which gathers together on one page pretty much everything you can do with Google – which is a lot!
Google Librarian Central explains Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). With CSE, you can create a custom search engine to search just the sites you want. For example, see John Doyle’s (of Washington & Lee Law School Library) Searching U.S. Law School Websites.
If I’d have one Google tip to share, it would be to check out the Advanced Search screen. You can limit by:
- format – Nice if you’re giving a presentation and you want to see if anyone else has created a PowerPoint on a similar topic. Also good if you want PDFs
- date – This is good if you only want to see things posted recently.
- domain – Not every Web site has a search engine – or if it does, it may not be very good. But, by entering in the main URL for the site you want to search into the domain box, you’ve created a Google search engine just for that site. I use the one all the time, especially when helping our cite checkers track down a poorly cited Web page.