The tips below are useful when searching Google and other databases.
Search term example | Explanation |
“ethical consumer” | Use double quotes (“”) if you want Google to search a phrase in that exact order |
beverages -tea | Type a minus (-) sign immediately before the term you want to exclude. The minus sign should be placed immediately before the word preceded by a space. This search retrieves items on various beverages other than tea |
“fair trade” tea OR coffee | Google’s default is to search all the words you type in your search. If you want it to search either one or several words, you can use the OR operator (note that OR must be typed in upper-case) |
“student protest” 1960..1970 | If you want to limit the result to pages covering the subject within a specified date (e.g. 1960-1970) type the date separated by two stops (..) and no spaces |
~school | If you want to search for synonyms place the tilde ~ immediately in front of the word or phrase. Eg ~school will retrieve pages on college, academy, university, education, etc. |
consum* | Insert an asterisk (*) as a wildcard symbol. This allows stem or word variation searches. For example typing consum* will retrieve material on consumer, consumers, consumerism, consumption, etc. |