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Grey Literature Guide: Google Advanced Search

Google Advanced Search

When using Google or any other search engine, it’s important to use search commands effectively to locate the most relevant and high-quality grey literature for your research needs. By default, Google often prioritises commercial websites or country-specific results, so it’s essential to apply advanced search techniques to push beyond these limitations.

In this section, we’ll guide you through the features of Google Advanced Search and provide tips on how to use it effectively to discover grey literature that supports your research.


Google Search Limitations 

Google is not objective. It personalises your search results, using information like your location and search history, to return results it thinks you'd like to see.

This is useful in everyday life but is problematic when it comes to research, as we want our results to be objective and reproduceable. 

It also leads to filter bubbles: an online environment, created by personalisation and algorithms, where people only see content and information which confirms and aligns with their existing beliefs. With any research, it's important we're able to see results which reflect multiple viewpoints, not just content which reflects our existing knowledge and position.

To mitigate this:

  • Perform multiple searches, using different keywords to surface content which offers different perspectives. Think about the connotations of the language you're using. For example, if you're researching the arms trade in a particular country, a search for 'militarisation' will return different results, with a particular perspective, compared to searching for 'defence industry'.
  • Try clearing your cookies and browsing history before you create your search.
  • You could also use an alternative search engine, like Duck Duck Go, which doesn't personalise your search results.

Using Google Effectively

Internet search engines, like Google, can be very useful for finding grey literature sources, particularly web content and reports. They also work well for initial scoping searches, to give a sense of what grey literature is available on a topic.

However, because they search the internet generally, these search engines can return a huge amount of results. You can use search commands and the advanced search options offered by these search engines, to focus your search and surface relevant grey literature. 

 

Google's Advanced Search 

Google's Advanced search allows you to be more specific with your search. The easiest way to access it, is to simply google 'advanced search' and select the top result. 

The top section is where you enter your search terms. Each different line corresponds to a different search command:

  • Top line: a standard 'AND' search. Google will search for all the keywords you enter here. This is the default way Google searches.
  • Second line : a phrase search (usually done by placing quote marks around the words). It searches for the keywords you enter together, in that exact order. 
  • Third line: an 'OR' search. You'll see results containing at least one of the words you enter here. This is useful for searching for synonyms and related terms. (Google will try to search for terms related to your keywords automatically, but it might not catch all of them.)
  • Fourth line: a 'NOT' search. Use this to exclude results mentioning certain terms. You will not see any results that include the keywords you enter here. (Use this line and rarely and with care. You could accidentally exclude results that you do want to see.)
  • Final line: date filter. Use this line to limit your results to a certain date range. You can also apply a date range after you run a search using Google's filters. 

 


Advanced Filters

As well as being able to control your keyword search, you can also refine parameters of your search using dedicated filters. Two of the most useful options are the site or domain and the file type filter.

 

 

Site or domain Search

Using the site or domain search feature in Google Advanced Search is invaluable for narrowing your results to specific, reliable sources. By targeting particular domains, such as .gov, .edu, or .org, you can focus on authoritative content from government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profit organisations. This ensures the information is more likely to be credible and relevant to academic or professional research. Additionally, limiting your search to a specific website helps you find resources directly from organisations or repositories relevant to your field, saving time and improving the accuracy of your search results.

What is a domain?

A domain is the part of a website’s address (URL) that indicates its source or ownership. It provides information about the type of organisation hosting the content, helping users assess its credibility.

 

Two approaches:

  • Search across a specific website: Enter the main site URL. e.g. 'un.org' for the United Nations website
  • Search for a type of website: Enter a domain e.g., .gov, .ac, edu, or .org to limit to types of organisation.

 

Domain (web ending)

Type of website

.co.uk / .com / .net​

 Commercial and general​

.edu / .ac (e.g., ac.uk)​

 Academic institutions (Universities, Colleges, Research establishments)​

.gov (e.g, .gov.uk)​

 Government websites (including local)​

.org (e.g., .org.uk)​

 Organisations (often non-profit but not always)​

.int Intergovernmental Organisations

File Type

Search for pages in a specific file format. 

Select a file type from the drop down menu. This is useful for finding specific types of grey literature:

File type​

Example use​

Adobe Acrobat PDF (pdf)​

 Reports and policy documents are often available as PDFs​

Microsoft Excel (xls)​

 Data may be available as Excel spreadsheets​

Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)​

 Conference presentations may be available as PowerPoints​

 


Google Advanced Searching

Watch the video below to see for a more in-depth overview of how to effectively use Google's advanced search.

 

Using Google Advanced Search

Google is by far the most popular online search engine, and you will probably be very familiar with its basic search function.

However, you may well be unaware of Google's Advanced Search function, a tool that gives users far more control over their searches. And in this video, we will look at how you can start using Advanced Search to retrieve more relevant and more useful results for your work.

So, for this video, let's imagine we are looking for research on our upcoming essay topic of care leavers and their transition to adulthood.

By pulling out our keywords 'care leavers', 'transition' and 'adulthood', it will be easier for us to use the advanced search function once we get there.

We're going to assume that we have already found some academic materials on the topic, but we now want to broaden the search to materials published outside of academia, for example, reports from charities, government bodies or international organisations.

These types of material are often called 'grey literature'.

So, we might start by entering our keywords into the basic Google search bar. So, these would be 'care leavers', 'transition' and 'adulthood'. We can then enter to run the search.

By clicking on 'Tools', we can see that using these keywords, Google has found around 690,000 results. And while many of these results are going to be potentially useful for our assignment, a lot of these results are not going to be suitable sources of information for an academic essay. Not to mention the fact that this number of results would be completely unfeasible to scan through.

So, to improve our search. Let's now switch over to Advanced Search and see if we can gain more control over our search and the results we are seeing.

You can access the Advanced Search function by running a basic search and again selecting 'Tools' from underneath the search bar and then clicking on Advanced Search.

Alternatively, you can simply run a basic Google search for 'advanced search', and it should appear as the top result.

The first thing you'll notice after switching over is the more detailed Advanced Search interface. This is roughly split between the keyword search bars at the top, and then the advanced filters we'll be using to narrow our search at the bottom.

Let's begin by entering our keywords at the top of the page. We now have a number of search bars to choose from, which all do slightly different things.

The 'all these words' search bar at the top is the default AND search, and will be the main one we will be using today. And we could simply enter all four of our keywords here.

However, as one of our key terms, 'care leavers' is a phrase made up of two words, it might be more effective to enter this in the second 'this exact word or phrase' search bar, to make sure these words are treated as a single phrase, rather than two separate, unconnected words.

The third search bar labelled 'any of these words' will run an OR search and can be used if you want your search to include alternate terms for one of your keywords.

For example, we could add words like 'adult' and 'independence' along with our key word 'adulthood' to ensure these relevant words are also searched for. But it's worth pointing out that Google will automatically attempt to include alternatives and synonyms for keywords, even when entered in the top default search bar. And so that's what we'll use in our search today.

So first let's try 'care leavers' as an exact phrase, along with our other two keywords in the top search bar. Next, let's have a look at the filters at the bottom of the page. This is where we really start seeing the advantages of using the Advanced Search.

Two of the most useful tools here, and the ones we'll be looking at today, are the 'site or domain' and the 'file type' filters. Let's have a quick look at both of these.

The 'site or domain' filter allows us to limit our search so that we only see results from certain domains, and in this way narrow our results to the types of information we are most interested in.

For example, we might want to limit our results to those from UK government bodies by using the domain '.gov.uk'. Or we may be interested in results from UK universities, in which case we could use the '.ac.uk' domain.

For this example, though, we'll imagine we're interested in results from UK charities who can normally be found at the '.org.uk' domain.

If you are interested in more useful domains, you may want to use to filter your search, see the list underneath this video.

Next let's have a look at the file type filter. This is going to allow us to limit our results to a particular type of document.

There are a number of interesting options here; we could search Microsoft Excel files for numerical data, or we might want to look for presentations by limiting to Microsoft PowerPoint files. But probably the most useful, and the one we will try out here, is the Adobe Acrobat PDF filter, as this is the most common format for published documents.

So as well as our '.org.uk' filter, let's add the PDF filter and then run the search.

Straight away we can see our results are now all coming from '.org.uk' websites, and are all in the PDF format, meaning we are now mostly seeing published reports from registered UK charities and similar bodies, which are far more substantial and better referenced than the information we would normally find on website pages.

Another thing to note is the number of results; which at around 6,300, is now a fraction of the well over half a million we had previously.

If we want to filter our search further, we can also restrict our results to a certain time frame.

So again by selecting 'Tools', and then the 'Any time' drop-down and then the 'Custom range...' option. For our example, let's say we only want to see reports from the last five years. To do this, I will enter '2019' in the 'From' box and then hit 'Go'.

Our results are still PDF documents from UK organisations, but they have now all been published since the start of 2019. This can be a useful filter to use when you are looking for the most up to date information on your topic.

Let's now run a slightly different search to get at a different set of results on our topic. To return to our advanced search, make sure 'Tools' is selected and then click on 'Advanced Search'.

This time round, let's see if we can find some material from government bodies in the UK. To do this, we will need the domain used by the government, which is normally '.gov.uk', and we'll enter this in the site or domain box.

Let's now run the search again.

Our results are now all PDF reports published by some section of the UK government. This could be really useful for my research on the topic, and might have unearthed important policy documents that I can now engage with, like this one on 'Supporting Young People from Care to Independence'.

If we go back, we see we are also seeing material from local government bodies like this one from Brighton and Hove Council, as they are still using the '.gov.uk' domain.

And if we were particularly interested in results from local government, we could make a note of the specific 'brighton-hove' site name and add this before '.gov.uk' in our site or domain search.

While we could do this by returning to our advanced search, let's also look at how once we've got the hang of Advanced Search, we can start making changes to our search directly in the search bar at the top of the page.

So to quickly understand the search bar, we see our keywords at the start, 'transition' and 'adulthood', we then see "care leavers" in double quotation marks as it is an exact phrase, and then we see our domain and file type filters added with the operators 'site:' and 'filetype:' followed, without a space, with the '.gov.uk' and PDF filters.

Let's go ahead and add 'brighton-hove' to our site search in front of '.gov.uk'. And we can then hit enter to run the search. We are now only seeing published reports from inside the Brighton and Hove Council website, which might be useful to give local context to our work.

And if we return to our advanced search, we can see that the change has been made inside the 'site or domain' box.

Now if we return to our search, and if we also add a date filter of the last five years, we can see just how powerful the Advanced Search function can be, as we have now narrowed our search all the way down to just ten results.

Bear in mind, you can use this site search technique to run an advanced search within any web site you are interested in.

Okay, that's the end of our video today. Hopefully you now have some strategies to take more control over your Google searches, and if you need any more support with Google Advanced Search, make sure to check out the rest of our guide.

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Useful URLs

Use the quick links to academic institution domains and government websites to streamline your research and access trusted information.

Country Domain Country Domain
Antigua and Barbuda edu.ag Malaysia edu.my
Argentina edu.ar Malta edu.mt
Australia edu.au Mexico edu.mx
Austria ac.at Morocco ac.ma
Bangladesh ac.bd Nepal edu.np
Bangladesh edu.bd New Zealand ac.nz
Belgium ac.be Nicaragua edu.ni
Botswana ac.bw Nigeria edu.ng
Brazil edu.br Oman edu.om
Brunei edu.bn Pakistan edu.pk
China ac.cn Papua New Guinea ac.pg
China edu.cn Peru edu.pe
Colombia edu.co Philippines edu.ph
Costa Rica ac.cr Poland edu.pl
Cyprus ac.cy Qatar edu.qa
Djibouti edu.dj Rwanda ac.rw
Ecuador edu.ec Saudi Arabia edu.sa
Egypt edu.eg Serbia ac.rs
El Salvador edu.sv Serbia edu.rs
Eritrea edu.er Singapore edu.sg
Estonia edu.ee Somalia edu.so
Ethiopia edu.et South Africa ac.za
Fiji ac.fj South Korea ac.kr
Ghana edu.gh South Sudan ac.ss
Guatemala edu.gt Spain edu.es
Hong Kong edu.hk Sri Lanka ac.lk
India ac.in Sri Lanka edu.lk
India edu.in Sudan edu.sd
Indonesia ac.id Taiwan edu.tw
Iran ac.ir Tanzania ac.tz
Israel ac.il Thailand ac.th
Italy edu.it Turkey edu.tr
Jamaica edu.jm Uganda ac.ug
Japan ac.jp Ukraine edu.ua
Jordan edu.jo United Arab Emirates ac.ae
Kenya ac.ke United Kingdom ac.uk
Lebanon edu.lb Uruguay edu.uy
Libya edu.ly Vietnam edu.vn
Macao edu.mo Zambia ac.zm
    Zimbabwe ac.zw

Using the search bar

Once you're familiar with these different search commands, you can type your search out in Google's standard search bar, rather than using the advanced search.

  • To a limit to a site or domain, use 'site:'
  • To a limit to specific format, use 'filetype:'
  • You can also specify that you want to see certain keywords in the title of your search results using 'intitle:' This can help to focus your results.


 

Using advanced search operators such as intitle, site, and filetype allows for precise and efficient web searches. By combining these operators, you can narrow down results to specific formats, domains, and keywords, ensuring that you find the most relevant and authoritative information quickly.

 

For example,

the search: intitle:sustainability site:gov.uk filetype:pdf finds pdfs (mostly reports) from UK government sites with the word 'sustainability' in the title:

 

 

 


Next Section: Evaluating Grey Literature

Evaluating grey literature is essential to ensure the sources you use are credible, accurate, and relevant to your research. The next section will introduce key evaluation techniques, including the AACODS checklist, to help you assess the quality and significance of grey literature sources effectively.