Find words, find scholars, search tips

Find Words in a Webpage or PDF

1. When you’re looking at the webpage or PDF, get a search bar by simultaneously pressing Ctrl+ f (or Option + f for Macs). The search bar will appear near the top or bottom of your browser.
2. Type in the word(s) you’re looking for.
3. As you type, the word(s) should begin to be highlighted on the page. If a word isn’t in the page, you’ll hear a beep and won’t be able to fill in any more characters in the Find box.
4. If the word(s) are there, click Next and/or Previous to search through the page.

Find Colleagues or Long-Lost Professors

Our Directory has listings for current faculty and staff.

If you don’t see a faculty member in our directory, try Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/.

Tips from Google’s Search help pages

• Search is always case insensitive.
• Use the words that are most likely to appear on the page.

The Square Brackets [ ] below…

…denote queries.

• [ to be or not to be ] is an example of a query.
• [ to be ] or [ not to be ] are two examples of queries.

Phrase search (”") or Search exactly as is (+)

Consider the exact words in that exact order without any change.

Attach a + immediately before a word (don’t add a space after the +) to match that word precisely as you typed it. Double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.

• [ +child care ] will return information about child care, but not childcare.

Search within a specific website (site:)

Specify that your search results must come from a given website, or specify a whole class of sites.

• [ canada site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain.
• [ canada site:.ca ] will return results only from Canadian sites.

Terms you want to exclude (-)

Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results.

The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space.

• [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software.

Exclude as many words as you want by using the – sign in front of all of them.

• [ jaguar -cars -football -os ].

The – sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ’site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

Fill in the blanks (*)

The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. The wildcard works only on whole words, not parts of words.

Examples:

• [ Google * ] returns results about many of Google’s products.
• [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills.

The OR operator

To specifically allow either one of several words, use the OR operator (note: type ‘OR’ in ALL CAPS).

• [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years.
• [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page.

The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator is the default, so it is not needed.)

Punctuation that is not ignored

• Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
• The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
• The hyphen – is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the – and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
• The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].