Two Search Refinement Tips That Helped My Students Today

The students in one of my classes are currently working on some Arduino projects of their own choosing. A few of them had the idea to build and program model cars. The trouble they ran into is that we didn't have any Bluetooth modules and a lot of the plans they were looking at called for Bluetooth modules. They were starting to get frustrated with their search results when I interjected with the quick tip to exclude "Bluetooth" in the advanced search menu in Google. 

By excluding "Bluetooth" from the search results and choosing "filetype PDF" in the advanced search menu my students were able to get past a lot of their initial frustration. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to exclude words from search results and how to search by file type. 

Another little tip to pass along to your students when they are searching for PDFs is to remind them to use "Ctrl + F" (Windows computers) or "Command + F" (Mac computers) to search within a PDF for keywords or phrases.

I include more tips like these in my on-demand webinar, Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know.