Hi everyone! Nice to see you again. After some reflection, I realized that my last post was perhaps a bit too much for one installment — both for you to read and for me to write! So this week, I tried to crank out something short and sweet: a round-up of search hacks that make research easier and more efficient. This post still ended up longer than I intended, but only because there were so many legitimately useful things to share!
Thanks for bearing with me as I figure out this newsletter business. Let’s dive in!
I’m old enough to remember dial-up modems and iPods but young enough that I’ve relied on computers and the internet for virtually all of my working life. It’s difficult for me to imagine writing something long and complex without the aid of a computer. And it’s downright impossible for me to fathom the analog research process. The writers and scholars of yore must have had much bigger brains that I—or at least, much better note-taking and organizational skills.
Nowadays, it’s quick and easy to search the internet, the library, and your own files for whatever term, name, or phrase you want. But as with so many things technological, great power also brings great frustration, and modern search tools often bring up too many results to be useful. Fortunately, there are ways to home in on what you seek.
Simple search tricks
Quotes
Putting a string of words in quotes returns only results with those exact words in that exact order. It’s particularly useful when the individual words are common but when that particular combination of words means something specific or can lead you to a specific source.
For example, I use Scrivener to organize my book research, and searching the project binder for leaves of grass
brings up 1,000+ results. Thanks a lot, Scrivener. Putting the phrase in quotes, however, winnows the list down to 10 files that all relate to Walt Whitman’s famous collection of poetry.
Best of all, this trick works in many other settings, including Google, library search engines, and the finder search bar on Macs.
AND/OR/-
These operators dictate the relationship between two search terms. AND
brings up results that contain both terms while OR
brings up results that have at least one. Since I’m usually trying to narrow down search results, my favorite is -
, which omits results containing the word after the negative sign.
For example, a Google search for grass -lawns
eliminates many of the top hits related to lawn care and turfgrasses.
*
I’m indebted to an MIT librarian who, during a training session for Knight Science Journalism Project fellows, reminded me that you can use an asterisk to represent an unknown character or word in your search term or phrase. The search engine can then fill in the blank with whatever it finds based on the rest of your query.
For instance, searching the Oregon State University library for grassland*
returns results for both grassland and grasslands (plural). It doesn’t change the overall number of results by much, but it does affect how they are ranked, and thus, what I see in the first few pages of results.
Note: I’ve found this strategy to be most useful with library search engines, which tend to be a little less forgiving than Google. Unfortunately, the * operator doesn’t seem to work in Scrivener. (If any Scrivener wizards know differently, please share!)
Google-specific search tips
Especially when paired with the tools above, these tags can further narrow and accelerate the search process.
site:
allows you to search specific websites or domains, including .gov, .edu, .org.
For example, searching for grass site:oregonstate.edu
returns grass-related results from OSU websites. And searching for grass site:edu
returns grass-related results from academic domains.
filetype:
allows you to search for specific formats, like pdfs and ppts.
For example, searching for grass filetype:pdf
returns grass-related results containing pdf files.
before:
& after:
allow you to search for publications dates before or after a certain year.
For example, searching for grass before:2010
returns grass-related results published before 2010.
This is particularly useful if you’re looking for something like the first round of news coverage about an event that occurred in the past.
Note: you can also narrow results by date on the regular Google search page by going to the Tools button in the upper right and selecting a date range (see below). You can also apply all of these filters and more in Google’s advanced search.
Scrivener-specific search tips
I’ve been using Scrivener for years and learn more about its hidden capabilities every day. Here are some useful, new-to-me, search-related discoveries:
Customize your search
I’m embarrassed to admit that I just recently learned that it’s possible to set the parameters for the search bar. Just click the little down arrow next to the magnifying class and choose from the options (see below).
For instance, “search binder selection only” will search only the selected folder—a function I’ve sought for ages!
Locate a file
Say you (and by you, I mean, I) have a giant, sprawling Scrivener binder and you (I) have an annoying habit of putting a document in one folder when it’s clear, in hindsight, that it really should go somewhere else.
Say that using the search options above, you finally manage to locate a particular document in the results list but don’t know where in your binder it lives. Simply right-click the file name and select “reveal in binder” and voila — you (ahem, I) can finally figure out where you stuck the dang thing. (Thanks to the Scrivener experts in Science Binders for that tip!)
That’s all from me! Please share your own questions and tips in the comments and chat!