Editor’s note: this article is the first part of The Fix’s series on advanced search for journalists. Make sure you’re subscribed to our weekly newsletter so you don’t miss the next instalments.

One of the first things a journalist should learn is how to find stories, data, and sources. The world wide web is full of open sources, but they are often underestimated. And web search skills are usually given for granted.

A proper approach to search engines is a good starting point in many senses. First, knowing how search engines work helps journalists to understand how people search.

Autocomplete is a feature within several search engines. It’s helpful as a user when searching because it completes your searches while typing. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Google explains its autocomplete function in these terms:

“Autocomplete predictions reflect real searches that have been done on Google. To determine what predictions to show, our systems look for common queries that match what someone starts to enter into the search box but also consider:

1) The language of the query

2) The location a query is coming from

3) Trending interest in a query

4) Your past searches”

So, one of the first things you want to do as a journalist is to turn off the usage of your past searches: you want to know other people’s interests, not yours. You can do that using the anonymous browsing function your browser should have, or you can turn it off following specific instructions – if available – of the search engine you are using.

Google, for example, allows you to turn off your personal search results.

And you will probably want to neutralise your location as much as possible if you are covering something that is not local. In this case, anonymous browsing is still helpful, but sometimes having clear evidence of what people are searching for in your area could also be significant.

Finally, you will focus on the language of the query: if you are covering a topic in Spain, you will search in Spanish.

Map a topic using autocomplete suggestions

Now, let’s focus on the third point: “trending interest in a query.” Keeping in mind that external input continually solicits trending searches, we will discover that autocomplete is a powerful tool for mapping any topic.

Assume you’ve heard about the Just Stop Oil movement. Not only do you want to know more, but you also want to cover them, starting with an approach as neutral as possible. First of all, just search.

The autocomplete function suggests different search terms that you can note.

*Autocomplete suggestions by Google for “just stop oil” query*

But you can do something more: if you start typing any single letter after your query, you will find different results in the autocomplete field. If you type into the search bar “Just Stop Oil a”, you will see “Just Stop Oil activists”, “Just Stop Oil arrests”, “Just Stop Oil aberdeen”, and so on. You should note every result and then try with “just stop oil b”, “just stop oil c”, etc.

I always recommend doing this – at least for the first time – by your hands: it’s the best way to understand the process, keeping in mind that we are getting suggestions taken from real searches made by real people.

But technology comes to help us: for example, it is possible to scrape Google’s Autocomplete Suggestions following techniques like this one.

If you collect all these results, remove not-related words or sentences, and then organise them in a map, categorising the different suggested queries, at the end of the process, you will have in your hand an overview of the topic.

*A first draft, still very superficial, of mapping autocomplete suggestion (made with Canva)*

The deeper you go into this process, the more accurate the map will be.

For example, you can reiterate this process using different search engines (depending on the topic and the area you are searching for) and using platforms’ internal search engines, too. YouTube – which is de-facto a widespread search engine itself – Facebook, Instagram, TikTik, and so on have their own search functionalities, and it’s helpful to browse them, too. The only limit you should put to this first phase is the time you have.

You can put after or before your query not only letters but also prepositions, conjunctions, and adverbs. You can look for synonyms. You can see the related content at the end of any Search Engine Result Page (SERP). You can reiterate the process with different queries, related or not.

I use this process for SEO reasons, too: if you know what people are searching for, you will probably see a way to answer their queries, which is the first rule for a “people first” SEO approach.

But this is just the beginning.

Advanced search sections

In its settings, Google provides you with a section called “Advanced Search.” It leads to an internal page where you will see different search bars, each one with its function.

The first section is called Find pages with…

You can search for all the words you will type.
You can search for the exact match of the sentence.
You can exclude words unrelated to your topic and set numeric ranges if needed.

The second section is called Then narrow your results by…

You can, first of all, narrow your search for language, region, and last update.

For example, I decided to search for “Just Stop Oil” excluding the word “cooking” – I found it in the suggestions, and I think it is an unrelated word – and narrowed the results by these conditions: English, UK, past week.

By clicking on “Advanced Search” at the bottom of the page, I get the SERP answering this query with all the conditions I added.

But it’s not over, because the narrowing section still has much stuff to explore. Let’s assume we want to find out how the UK government speaks about Just Stop Oil. More precisely, we want to see documents published on the UK government’s official websites.

Since we know that the UK government’s websites’ extension is .gov.uk, we can narrow the search to this domain only.

And we can also look for a specific type of document. We can look for .pdf, for example.

Again, by clicking on the Advanced Search button, we can find the results of our narrowed search: 22 documents that we can download and analyse.

If we look at the Google search bar, it’s now filled with a peculiar query: “Just Stop Oil” -cooking site:.gov.uk filetype:pdf

The quotation marks, the minus sign, the colon, and the word filetype followed by a colon are search modifiers. Combining all the search modifiers in different ways is possible even if not directly allowed by the advanced search form.

There are several guides to search modifiers online. The best source – even if you can’t take for granted that they will work forever: you just need to try – is probably this unofficial guide to Google’s advanced search guide. You can then look for advanced search operators on any other search engine: Bing, Yandex, Yahoo etc.

For example, looking for official documents containing data and contracts related to the Italian PNRR (a major economic development plan launched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic), I created these two advanced searches strings on Google:

PNRR site:.gov.it OR site:.governo.it filetype:xls

PNRR site:.gov.it OR site:.governo.it filetype:xls OR filetype:pdf

Both search for the word PNRR on the official Government website and all the Ministries’ and Government functions’ websites. The first one provides only xls files; the second one also includes pdf files.

Thanks to this string, I was able to download an xls full of useful information (names, resumes, fees… all in the first result of this SERP)

Once you’ve found a search string that works for you, you can improve your workflow by adding this string to Google Alert: this is a great way to keep up-to-date.

Let’s keep up-to-date

In my case, since the publication frequency of official documents is not so high, I allowed Google Alerts to send me an email anytime a document of that kind has been published and indexed by Google.

Google offers you advanced search even for photos or videos.

These functions are a little bit hidden. But you can try them following these two links: advanced search for photos / advanced search for videos.

As you can see, each of these different kinds of advanced searches offers you additional or peculiar options.

For example, you can search photos by colour, size, or aspect ratio. Or you can search videos by length or quality or kind of subtitles.

What we have seen till now it’s quite a lot, but it is just the beginning of advanced search techniques. We will go deeper in the second part.

Source of the cover photo: https://depositphotos.com/

Advanced search: how to dig using search engines – Part I

Alberto Puliafito

From autocomplete suggestions to search modifiers, how to start surfing open source information on the world wide web

Author

Alberto Puliafito

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