Search tricks that make studying easier

YOU know to put search terms in quotes to get better results, but there are some extra things you can do to speed up your Googling.

> When you’re searching for a phrase, you don’t need to know the entire expression because you can use asterisks to stand for “the bit that I forgot”.

Suppose you’ve got a bit of a song playing in the back of your mind. You’re humming quietly, “Cahaya hidupku tum-tum-ti-tum/Bisa jiwa tum-ti-tum” and it’s driving you crazy that you don’t remember those missing words.

Searching for Cahaya hidupku Bisa jiwa by itself yields nothing, and putting in “Cahaya hidupku Bisa jiwa” doesn’t work because you’re not actually looking for that expression.

But throw it into Google as “Cahaya hidupku * Bisa jiwa *” and you will get a result telling you that it’s Istana Chinta by P. Ramlee and S. Sudarmaji, as well as the missing words: “Cahaya hidup ku jadi gerhana/Bisa jiwa menanggung derita.”

> If you’re researching, it can be tough to distinguish where information comes from, which is important because it will greatly impact how you view it.

Online, you might typically look at the domain name to see if it’s a company with a .com or a government group with a .gov.

If you want to look for psychology resources that come from a bona fide school and not an organisation or company, tell Google to restrict results to EDU domains.

Search first for psychology. Take a quick look and then search for psychology site:. edu. Note: there is a colon, a full stop and then the EDU. What you see now is psychology resources from schools around the world.