[Monro]

Originally Posted by Aaronius31

I am in debt to you my good friend! Knowing this trick going into college = AWESOME

Well, since you’re taking this little trick to college to help with your studies you may need to add one more piece to the puzzle to make your searching a little more targeted. Let me explain now.

For example:

Say you want to search a specific site for things about or related to Alizee (or some other search term.. but we’re using Alizee in this example). Here’s a potential problem.

Using the search: Alizee site:cnn.com -poulicek –paradis will indeed find specific articles on a specific website listing Alizee stuff and should also eliminate search results with Alizee Poulicek and Alizee Paradis in them. But.. other types of Alizee listings may show up. There may be 100s of other girls named Alizee that show up also and you can’t minus all of them out (this doesn’t happen for Alizee but can happen when searching for other things). So you’ve decided that you want to target your search term more exactly.

Using the search: Alizee Jacotey site:cnn.com -poulicek –paradis will indeed search a specific site for any articles with the term Alizee in them and will also find any articles with the term Jacotey in them, although, there may be 1000’s of articles with Jacotey listed that have absolutely nothing to do with Alizee Jacotey. You can get more targeted search results by using the “exact phrase” filter. That means using the quotes around your search term, which tells Google you want to find an exact phrase.

For example:

Using the search: “Alizee Jacotey” site:cnn.com -poulicek –paradis will search for the EXACT phrase Alizee Jacotey (not Alizee) on CNN.com and will leave out articles with Alizee Poulicek and Alizee Paradis. The only articles that should show up should list the exact phrase Alizee Jacotey.. and.. those listed articles shouldn’t contain Poulicek or Paradis.

Now, of course, CNN.com really doesn’t have anything listed about our Alizee nor does Alizee use her full name (Alizee Jacotey) for her business so don’t search for that particular exact phrase or your Alizee articles will be limited. I used her full name as an example on how to target/pinpoint better searches.

* A good search for Alizee on TF1 in France is: Alizee site:tf1.fr -renault

Renault is a car, I see it show up on eBay.fr when I search for Alizee but it also shows up (a lot sometimes) on regular Alizee searches.


When I search for my own name: firstname lastname site:cnn.com I got thousands of results. But when I used “exact phrase” in combination with site search: “firstname lastname” site:cnn.com the results were drastically reduced. So, by shaping your searches queries you can drastically expand or reduce the number of results you see in Google and quickly find what you're looking for.

Hope this helps and wasn’t too confusing. Good luck in your studies.