Knight Center for Environmental Journalism

A journalist’s guide to Google

A tipsheet by David Poulson, associate director, Knight Center for Environmental Journalism

Download a printable version of this tipsheet

Searching with Google

Google is likely much more powerful than you give it credit. The popular search engine can give an incredible boost to newsgathering.

Visit google.com when you aren’t under deadline. Get a feel for what it offers. You’ll more than recover this time by sharpening skills to give you a jump on deadline.

Google search basics

Search engines traditionally use Boolean operators. That’s just a fun way of saying searches with the words “and” “or” and “like.”

Google defaults to an “and” search. If you search for Lansing crime rate, you’ll pull up all the Web pages with the words Lansing and crime and rate somewhere on them. That means your search could produce pages that discuss the city of Lansing, Ingham County crime and Michigan’s tax rate. If you want to search for pages with the exact phrase, just put it between double quotes: "Lansing crime rate"

You can insert a Boolean "or" into a search. For instance, "gas prices" Lansing or Detroit will produce documents with the phrase gas prices and the word Lansing and at the same time produce documents with the phrase gas prices and the word Detroit.

Use the minus sign (dash) to avoid unwanted results. Say you want to search for bass because you want information on the fish. You know that bass also refers to deep musical notes and certain musical instruments. Search for bass –music and you’ll get only pages with the word bass but not the word music. (Note the space between bass and the minus, and the lack of a space between the minus and music).

Phrase your search as part of your answer. You're not looking for Web pages that ask your question. You're looking for pages that answer it. Instead of typing, "What is the average rainfall in the Amazon basin?", you might get better results by typing "The average rainfall in the Amazon basin is" Envision phrases that appear on the page that a perfect search would produce.

The site command lets you search a specific Web site. The format is search word site:web address. A search for angel site:www.msu.edu produces pages on the Angel course management system on MSU’s Web site. Pennsylvania State University also uses the Angel system, but those pages won’t appear in your search.

Localize results by adding a city name or zip code to your search term. Pizza East Lansing will give a list of phone numbers of places that sell pizza in East Lansing.

Limit results to the kind of files that get returned. Say you need data in a Microsoft spreadsheet. Such files end in .xls. Go to Google’s advanced search and limit the search to documents with the .xls format.

Google drops short words and digits to make searching faster. But sometimes those elements are important. If you look for Gilmore Girls Season 1, you’ll get all the pages with Gilmore and Girls and Season. The digit 1 won’t be used in the search. That’s when you’ll want to use the double quotes and search for "Gilmore Girls Season 1"

It doesn’t matter if you type a word in upper or lower case.

The "I’m feeling lucky" button goes directly to the first page Google finds.

Google scholar searches scholarly literature, peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. It finds articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. It also extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online.

Cool Google tricks:

Convert units. Type “teaspoons in 1 gallon” and you’ll find that there are 768 teaspoons in a gallon. This works even with very old, obscure or scientific units, but is most handy for simple metric conversions.
Define a word by typing define: before the word you want defined.
Calculate by typing your formula into the search window. (ex: 700/2 will produce 350 as the answer)
Type in an address and you often can get a map of its location.
Type in an area code for a map of the region it encompasses.
Type in a stock abbreviation and get back share values throughout the day. Tell readers how a business’s stock price fluctuated when news affecting it broke.
Type in a name and address and get a phone number.
Type in a phone number and get a name and address.
Type link:Web site name to get a list of sites that link to that Web site. If they are credible, the site may also be credible _ although that is hardly a guarantee.
Type in a flight number like "United 22" for a link to a map of that flight's progress.
Map by satellite at http://maps.google.com/ Click on "satellite.” Punch in a city, zoom in and behold.
Type in the tail number you see on an airplane for the full registration form for that plane.
Type in a VIN (vehicle identification number, which is etched onto a plate, usually on the door frame, of every car), to find out the car's year, make and model.
Type in a UPC bar code number for the description of the product.
Type a FedEx or UPS package number. Click search for tracking information.
Want more? Herehttp://labs.google.com you'll find links to new and even half-finished Google experiments.
Or just go to Google.com and poke around some of the lesser- known Google features: Froogle (product search), News, Groups (Internet discussion boards), Google Catalogs (hundreds of scanned-in product catalogs), Images (find graphics and photos from other people's Web sites), Blogger (publish your own online journal), Google language translation, or Google Answers (pay a professional researcher find the answers.)