By using the advanced search options of the major search engines you can improve your research time and more importantly the results you get back. Employing just a few of these research techniques can dramatically improve the quality of the results. And as more information is made available online, getting the best out of your research time is essential.

If you are looking for research papers / results you can limit your search by document type.

For example if you type the following into your search box you can limit your search to just pdf documents.

filetype:pdf

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most commonly used file types for research papers and articles. You can also limit your search by many of the common files used today including documents (doc) spreadsheets (xls) and many others.

Add a few keywords to your search string and you can reduce the number of hits you get in your results listing, but increase the quality of the results you do get.