Mar 09, 2017 08:03 AM EST By Audri Taylors, UniversityHerald Reporter

The ability to effectively conduct Google searches is one of the most important skills that 21^st century students should have. The information that students can gather from the internet is essential in their learning as well as education. And because the internet is a pool of all types and kinds of information, its users should be how to effectively utilize the tool to maximize its purpose especially in research and other educational purposes.

So here are a few tips to make your search more efficient.

Be specific with your searches

To be able to find the article you are looking for, you have to be very specific, and according to LifeHacker, you must be specific not just with the phrase, but also with the author's name if you have it; or you can type intitle(word) to find the word in the title you are looking for.

Increase the possible results by using an asterisk (*)

According to CampusTalkBlog, using an asterisk will broade man your search and will suggest the results that you could be looking for.

Be specific with the format of the document you are looking for

What you can do is type filetype: then put in the format style, for example jpg for images and docs or pdf for other files.

Search for related articles

To be able to bring up more related searches, use "related:" to be able to locate similar sites. This will help you discover other websites that could cover other bases for your research.

Limit search results

If there are certain sources that you do not want to show, you can use the minus sign (-) to exclude the search results from a specific site. If you also want to find a range of numbers like dates, or measurements, you can use two periods (..) to set the range.

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