Search tricks that make study easier

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

1. 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, “

and it’s driving you bonkers that you don’t remember those missing words.

Searching for “by itself yields nothing, and putting in “doesn’t work because you’re not actually looking for that expression. But throw it into Google as “and you will get a result that

by P. Ramlee and

tells you it’s S. Sudarmaji as well as the missing words. “

2. If you’re researching it can be tough to distinguish where information comes from. Where the information comes from is important because it will 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.

Suppose you want to look for psychology resources that come from a bona fide school, and not an organisation or company, you can do this by telling Google to restrict results to edu domains.

To see how this works, search first for psychology. Take a quick look, and now 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 all around the world. Want to restrict it to Malaysia? Search for psychology site:.edu.my.