Getting Better Search Results with Google Scholar: Some special search types

There are some other specific things you can do to search Google:

Author: to get works by someone with that name. Looking for a co-author? tp:name finds the name on the title page.

• the lack of a space between author:name is important. There shouldn't be a space after any of these commands.

Author name AROUND(2) author name should, in theory, get the first author name within 2 spaces of the second author name. (Alfonzo, Paige, 2016. Teaching Google Scholar, p. 54.)

Publication: to search in a publication. No space between Publication:title. (Alfonzo, 2016)

Related: www.???.??? where ? is the URL of a site you like, will retrieve other web sites that are like what you used.

Site: n?.??? and search terms, where ?.? is the URL of the site you want to search, yields internal documents and information 

for example site:census.gov adoption rates

(some of the tips above are based on a webinar presentation by Mary O'Kelly and Colleen Lyon, "Searching Google Like a Librarian." 9/13/2011).

You can search for images, of course, but you can also search using images-- click on the camera icon to upload an image to search with, or paste in a URL for the page where it is located.

You can make an image search more specific by recognizing a major color within the image you want and clicking on the palette on the lower left. This only works in image searches, but it's an interesting feature.

Google, and therefore Google Scholar, uses a number of symbols in searches:

$ indicates a price, so that you can search for a car of a certain price as [Volvo 245 $2000]

-dash finds words that are adjacent or linked, so pie-bald retrieves pie-bald and piebald

% gives a percent of something.

You can also get simple math, such as numbers operator numbers = ( e.g. 400 x 50=) and weight and measure conversions using =?, such as 400 grams= ? lbs.