BT Help >  Google Search

A few quick dos and don’ts while doing Google Search

1)     Don’t put a question as a query. Google only searches for words. Hence put specific words, no long sentences.

2)     Don’t use stop words. Google ignores stop words like “do,” “where,” “for,” “I,” “as,” et cetera, as they’re irrelevant for research. Hence don’t bother typing them.

3)     Be specific. Being to the point and specific is very important. Giving Google vague ideas will result in vague results. E.g.: If you want to search Royal Bank of Scotland, put Royal Bank Scotland, not Royal Bank.

4)     Don’t correct spelling mistakes. Google mostly recognizes spelling mistakes and suggests the alternative spelling that you can look up. E.g.: If you type:  Business Commication, Google will give an alternative: Business Communication, highlighting the word with the spelling mistake.

5)     The more the number of query terms, the narrower the result. Thus to narrow down your result to get the desired info key in more query terms. Google has increased its query term limit to 32 words, so use this to your advantage. Previously the word limit was 10, extra words were simply not taken into consideration. E.g.: Royal Bank gives 26,900,000 results, and Royal Bank Scotland gives 8,170,000 results.

6)      Query terms should be put in order. Google gives higher priority to results that have terms in the same order as the order of the query terms.

7)     Google is not case-sensitive. Hence don’t waste time pressing the Shift key again and again for upper case; both upper case and lower case use would give you the same results. Google Case-Sensitive and google case-sensitive gives the same number of results, 22,500,000.

8)      Use hyphenated terms where applicable. Hyphenated terms are used in different ways, with hyphen or as one word. Google searches for both variations when a hyphenated term is used for query. Eg. carryforward gives 303,000 results; whereas carry-forward gives 31,100,000 results.