The following are tips on Internet searching, and maximizing your searching efficiency:

File Type Searching: How can I find all the PDFs or all of the Word documents , or files of other types (eg Spreadsheet, PPT) on the internet on a given subject, or that have a particular term in their title?

PDFs: This is very useful, since articles and books are often scanned in as PDFs.

1. Google: Use the Google "file type" operator to find all the PDF in Google in the search space in the following exact format: single word subject or phrase (space)filetype:pdf

Or go to Google and to Google Advanced Search, and near the bottom of the options for narrowing the results youu can choose from a large number of file types:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Adobe Acrobat: (.pdf), Microsoft Word: (.doc) or the latest, (----); Microsoft Excel: (.xls) Adobe Postscript: (.ps), Microsoft PowerPoint: (.ppt), Rich Text Format: (rtf)

Search Operators:

Date searches: Just add DATE..DATE to your search box to accomplish this (two periods in between the dates like this 1900..1910). For instance, we know that James Wilcox was most likely born between 1835 and 1839 based on the information we have, so we could search for “Wilcox, James” 1835..1839. This will bring up only pages that include one or all of the dates 1835, 1836, 1837, 1838 and 1839. It will not exclude pages that include other dates (which we usually would not want to do.) But if we did want to do that we could exclude any date by typing -DATE, such as -1840 after our other terms.

Excluding terms in resulta of search: Place a minus sign before a term to exclude these unwanted results (Example: “wilcox, james” 1837 mahala -somerset). The minus sign can be placed in front of many terms to further refine results ( -dunbar -somerset -1907) or term strings (-“Wilcox, James Robinson”). Just make sure that the minus sign is placed directly before the term with no space in between. This works to exclude specific sites as well (-rootsweb).

File type operator, to find pdfs, dox, etc filetypes: subject filetype:pdf

Site Operator to find a term on a given website: site:SITEURL before a term or terms to do this. Example: site:familysearch.org “wilcox, james” –note that we didn’t place a space between ‘site:’ and the url and that we didn’t include the ‘http://www’ part either.

Nearby word searches: There is a way to ask Google to find terms near each other! Enter AROUND(1) between terms to do this. An example would be: “James Wilcox” AROUND(10) 1837. That means we want Google to look for pages where the exact name James Wilcox appears within 10 words of the date 1837. You can change the modifying number to anything you want (“James Wilcox” AROUND(3) 1837 or “James Wilcox AROUND(1) Mahala) a lower number means a closer association and thus, usually, fewer results. We can also apply this to multiple terms (Example: “Wilcox, James” AROUND(10) Mahala AROUND(5) 1837). You will be blown away by how much this helps you find more relevant results.

Page title searches: To search for only web pages with certain wording in the title of that page: titles use ‘allintitle:’ Example: allintitle: “Wilcox, James.”

Text searches: You can also search only the text, and exclude the titles, by using ‘allintext:’

Search operators

Google operator descriptions: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176061&p=1159512

You can use search operators and other punctuation to get more specific search results. Except for the examples below, Google Search usually ignores punctuation.

Punctuation & symbols

Even though you can use the punctuation marks below when you search, including them doesn’t always improve the results. If we don't think the punctuation will give you better results, you'll see suggested results for that search without punctuation.

Symbol	How to use it
`+`	Search for Google+ pages or blood types Examples: `+Chrome` or `AB+`
`@`	Find social tags Example: `@agoogler`
`$`	Find prices Example: `nikon $400`
`#`	Find popular hashtags for trending topics Example: `#throwbackthursday`
`-`	When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. Examples: `jaguar speed -car` or `pandas -site:wikipedia.org`
`"`	When you put a word or phrase in quotes, the results will only include pages with the same words in the same order as the ones inside the quotes. Only use this if you're looking for an exact word or phrase, otherwise you'll exclude many helpful results by mistake. Example: `"imagine all the people"`
`*`	Add an asterisk as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms. . Example: `"a * saved is a * earned"`
`..`	Separate numbers by two periods without spaces to see results that contain numbers in a range. Example: camera `$50..$100`