Using Google Search on the Queen's Website
Why use Google Search?
- The Schools & Departments structure page, generated from the Planning Office organisational structure database, contains an overview of the entire academic and administrative structure of the University. When looking for information contained within a specific unit, this page can be useful for finding the appropriate website or information quickly.
- The quicklinks from the Information For pages can be useful for finding information quickly when it is not initially clear which unit or department of the University is responsible for it. However, these rely to a large degree on anticipation of what website users might be looking for, and cannot be expected to cover all possible circumstances.
- When time is of the essence and the information needed can be clearly defined in a word or two, searching is undoubtedly faster than browsing through a directory of information such as those mentioned above (cf. the difference between using Google and Yahoo to find information on the wider internet).
- The various websites inside Queen's University contain a lot of "hidden extra" information, i.e. not part of the corporate website nor within the formal structure of schools and departments websites. Examples are detailed technical reports and papers on research group websites, information on local events deep within student club and society websites, tutorials and course notes that lecturers have made freely available on the internet, or extensive personal websites maintained within the schools and departments structure by enthusiastic individuals. Often the only feasible way to find this information is by searching.
How to search using Google Search
- The Search Homepage is the starting point for searching all websites in the qub.ac.uk domain
- A few other sites that don't end in qub.ac.uk but are hosted at Queen's, are also included in the search
- Best starting point if you are not sure which unit of the University the information you are searching is contained within
- User interface is the same as for Google and users familiar with using it should have no difficulties
Many sub-sites (departments and schools etc.) within Queen's implement a site-specific search, also using the Google facility. If the sub-site is large, this can be a very important navigation tool within the site. If a site has its own Google search, a link to it will normally be in the top right or bottom left of the home page.
After searching a sub-site, a site-specific query term will appear in the search box, e.g. searching for 'google' on the library site it would look like:
If it is necessary to refine the search, it is important that the
site:xxxxquery term is left there and only the search term (on the left hand side) changed. If the
site:xxxxis deleted then the whole of the qub.ac.uk site will be searched.
Additional Search Hints & Tips
To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant results.
Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages in which your query terms are near each other.
A single spelling suggestion is returned with the results for queries where the spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.
Note: Currently, the spell checker supports only US English.
Synonyms are other words that have the same or similar meanings. They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the results page.
The Sort by Date feature sorts and presents your search results based on date. The date of each file is returned in the results. Results that do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted by relevance.
By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. For example, to search for engineering product specification documents, enter:
To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.
Google supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example, to search for an office in either Belfast or Newry, enter:
Every Google search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.
Google searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george jones", "George Jones", and "George jones" all return the same results.
Google ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles. Google automatically disregards such terms as "where" and "how" , as well as certain single digits and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching. If you want to use stop words in your search, use the "+" sign or enclose your phrase containing stop words in quotation marks. Make sure that you include a space before the "+" sign.
For example, to search for Annual Report Version I:
You can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.
To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. Rather, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box.
For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline" or "airlines.". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline" and "airlines."
Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query.
You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.
For example, the search:will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."
You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.
Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search words. For example, the search:is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.
You may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain ways.
Restrict Type Query Syntax Example to a given location on your site allinurl; allintitle; inurl; intitle allinurl:google help
see Advanced Operators for details
to specific domains site: site:google.com
see Advanced Operators for details
to specific file types like Excel spreadsheets, PDFf docs, etc. filetype: filetype:pdf
To restrict the directories searched, enter a URL that drills down through the directory structure to the directories or files to be searched. For example, the query [google.com/manual/] restricts the search to everything at the manual level. If the trailing slash is not included, as in [google.com/manual], then all subdirectories are also searched.
Google Search supports several advanced operators, which are query words with special functions. A list of the advanced operators with explanation are provided below.
The search engine keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available in a backed-up format known as "cache." A cached version of a web page can be retrieved if the original page is unavailable (for example, the page's server is down). The cached page appears exactly as it looked when the crawler last crawled it and includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.
The query [cache:] shows the cached version of the web page. For instance, [cache:www.google.com] shows the cached page of Google's homepage.
Note: There can be no space between cache: and the web page URL in the query.
If you include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com press releases] shows the cached content with the words "press" and "releases" highlighted.
The query [info:] returns all information available for that particular URL. For instance, [info:www.google.com] shows information about the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the info: and the web page URL.
If you include [site:] in your query, the results are restricted to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices] finds pages about help within www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices. [help site:am.qub.ac.uk] finds pages about help within .am.qub.ac.uk URLs.
Note: There can be no space between the "site:" and the domain.
The query [link:] enables you to restrict your search to all pages that link to the query page. To do this, use the [link:sampledomain.com] syntax in the search box.
For example, to find all links to the Library's main page, enter:
If you start a query with [allinurl:], the search is restricted to results with all of the query words in the URL. For example, [allinurl: google search] returns only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the URL.
Note: [allinurl:] works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, [allinurl: foo/bar] restricts the results to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in the URL, but doesn't require that they be separated by a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent, or that they be in that particular word order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints.
If you include [inurl:] in your query, the results are restricted to documents containing that word in the URL. For example, [inurl:google search] returns documents that mention the word "google" in their URL and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document either in the URL or anywhere else in the document.
Note: There can be no space between the "inurl:" and the following word.
Note: [inurl:] works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, in the query [google inurl:foo/bar], the inurl: operator affects only the word "foo," which is the single word following the inurl: operator, and does not affect the word "bar." The query [google inurl:foo inurl:bar] can be used to require both "foo" and "bar" to be in the URL.
Putting [inurl:] in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting [allinurl:] at the front of your query. For example, [inurl:google inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl: google search].