Advanced Google Searches

Chances are that you have searched the internet using Google and are familiar with its simplicity. Just type something and let Google find relevant content for you. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?

There are times when you may want to further refine your searches in Google, and there are 2 approaches to doing that. The first approach is to type specific limiters into the Google search box. This works well if you already know what the parameters are and know the syntax for each.

The second approach is to use the Advanced Search page that provides a menu of options along with sample usages:

I think you’ll find it self-explanatory, so give it a try and hopefully you’ll level up your Google searches right away.

Also note that after you perform certain advanced searches, Google will auto-populate the proper syntax in its command line search for you. For example, if I populate the Advanced Search in this way:

all these words: ahsoka tano

none of these words: mandalorian

The resultant command line search will be:

ahsoka tano -mandalorian

The command line search syntax can come in handy if you want to apply advanced searches to other Google assets like Gmail, Google Images, Google Alerts, and any other Google site where you can enter a search string.

Level Up Your Google Searches

Google is a popular search engine because of its simplicity and highly relevant search results. For most searches, I can quickly and easily find what I am looking for, and rarely will I have to scroll to the next page of search results to find what I need. However, there are times when I need to refine my searches in specific ways. Did you know that there are some lesser-known advanced search options available?

The Advanced Search allows you to find pages that match a combination of all words in a list, exact phrases, any words in a list, none of the words in a list, or numbers in a range.

Results in advanced searches can be further restricted by language, region, last update, and other parameters.

There is also an Advanced Image Search that allows you to find images with all words in a list, exact phrases, any words in a list, or none of the words in a list.

Additionally, from the main page at www.google.com, you can specify “command line” search parameters. One of my favorite features is to search within a specific website by putting “site:” in front of a domain. For example, if I was looking for an article that I read in the Los Angeles Times, I could add “site:latimes.com” to my search query to restrict results to pages within that domain.

Another one of my favorites is to find websites that link to a certain URL. For example, if I wanted to find websites that direct the most traffic to https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html, I could search for “site:https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html”. Interestingly, according to this article, a Google employee recommends not using the “link:” operator. Furthermore, Google’s Refine web searches support page does not list the “link:” operator, but it does provide a bunch of other potentially useful operators to help you refine your search. That being said, I am still able to find modest success with the “link:” operator.

Hope this helps you level up your search game on Google.

LitCovid

If you’ve ever tried to search for medical literature, it is possible that you’ve used PubMed, a bibliographic database that contains more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. While it is possible to simply type a keyword or two and get search results, the ability to find what you’re looking for depends on your ability to leverage the rich metadata (e.g., medical subject headings, authors, publication dates, title words) that are associated with every citation.

Nowadays many people are searching PubMed for literature related to COVID-19. However, there is complexity in how research is performed and reported on the topic. For starters, the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the clinical disorder (COVID-19) are two entirely different things. To complicate matters, there are many variations in how people name and abbreviate both the virus and the clinical disorder. The search strings that you would need to enter just to capture literature related to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 can be complex. Enter LitCovid, a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus. It is basically a subset of PubMed citations that is updated daily and contains 28,764 articles as of today, July 5, 2020.

LitCovid articles are captures using a 2-step process. The first step is to run the following search query against PubMed:

"coronavirus"[All Fields] OR "ncov"[All Fields] OR "cov"[All Fields] OR "2019-nCoV"[All Fields] OR "COVID-19"[All Fields] OR "SARS-CoV-2"[All Fields]

The second step is a machine learning-assisted human review process to identify relevant articles and to discard irrelevant search results.

All publications in LitCovid are manually tagged with up to 8 article categories

• General Information: General information and news
• Mechanism: Underlying cause(s) of COVID-19 infections and transmission & possible drug mechanism of action 
• Transmission: Characteristics and modes of COVID-19 transmissions, such as human-to-human
• Diagnosis: Disease assessment through symptoms, test results, and radiological features
• Treatment: Treatment strategies, therapeutic procedures, and vaccine development
• Prevention: Prevention, control, response and management strategies
• Case Report: Descriptions of specific patient cases
• Epidemic Forecasting: Modeling and estimating the trend of COVID-19 spread

Users can filter search results by clicking on these 8 article categories, as well as other filter criteria including Chemicals, Journals, and Countries.

In the FAQ, it is stated that LitCovid tracks publications specific to COVID-19, while the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset contains a broader set of coronavirus literature which includes SARS (caused by SARS-CoV-1) and MERS.