Sean Carlson from Google has held sessions Friday and Saturday at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference on how journalists can use the search engine more effectively.
Here are some of his tips:
1. Don’t worry about capitalization. In addition, put minus (-) in front of words whose meaning you’re not working for. (When writing about H1N1, search “viruses -computer.”
2. Specific site search is the single-most helpful feature. You can refine a Google search to one URL. “bluefin tuna site:washingtonpost.com” will find articles on bluefin tuna at The Washington Post site.
3. The Google advanced search (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) function allows you to look for specific files, such as pdf files and Power Point presentations, if you know you’re looking for such documents.
4. Look at two sites to see what’s hot and what’s not in terms of searching. They are http://www.google.com/trends/ and http://www.google.com/insights/search.
5. There is a way to search just government sites. Go to http://www.google.com/unclesam.
