Search Tips

Choosing the right search terms is the key to finding the information you need. Start with the obvious – if you're looking for general information on SIMPROCESS, try SIMPROCESS. But it's often advisable to use multiple search terms; if you're planning to attend SIMPROCESS traning, you'll do better with training SIMPROCESS than with either training or SIMPROCESS by themselves. And training SIMPROCESS October may produce even better (or, depending on your perspective, worse) results.

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. For example, to attend training for SIMPROCESS, simply type training SIMPROCESS.

Google ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)

Another method for doing this is conducting a phrase search, which simply means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search.

More Tips!

1. Explicit Phrase: If you are looking for content about business activity monitoring, search for the explicitly phrase by enclosing the search phrase within double quotes.

   Example: "business activity monitoring"

2. Exclude Words:
   To search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising.  To do this, simply use the "-" sign in front of the word you want to exclude.

   Example Search: "business activity monitoring" -cash flow

3. Similar Words and Synonyms:
   To include a word in your search, and get results that contain similar words or synonyms, use the "~" in front of the word.

   Example: "business activity monitoring" ~metrics

4. Specific Document Types:
   For results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier "filetype:".  For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to business activity monitoring.

   Example: "business activity monitoring" filetype:ppt

5. This OR That:
   By default, a Google search includes all the terms specified in the search.  If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator.  (Note:  The OR has to be capitalized).

   Example: business activity monitoring OR business intelligence

Hope these Google search tips proves useful in your future Google searches.