Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron/Search suggestions
Wikiprojects sometimes have their own custom Google search, to sort through every website they have agreed is a reliable source. This often shows ample results that a Google news archive search does not. For example, Google Custom Search – Reliable Sources for Video Games is used for the video game Wikiproject.
When faced with a large number of links to sort through from any search, here's some ways to narrow it down to find what you want.
- For films, add in the name of the director or staring actor.
- For video games, try adding in the name of the company that produced it.
- For companies, try searching for the name of people involved there, to see if they have done any interviews. Adding in the word "interview" can sometimes help to generate more specific results.
- For television shows, try searching for the name of the channel they are on.
- For people: if someone is notable for a certain thing, search for that thing. Example, searching for Tom Forman will result in a large number of results. Not all of the people with that name are the same person of course. If you were looking for Tom Forman (producer) then adding in the word "producer" to the search, or the name of one of the shows he has worked on, would help narrows down the results. When searching for people its a good idea to search for the word "award" to see if they have won any awards, and the word "interview" to see if they have done any interviews.
Search parameters
- Using quotation marks in searches (e.g. "Search topic") can narrow search results, in which only results that have the entire term are generated.
- To narrow searches to specific sites, here's something that works in Google searches (be sure to include the topic in quotation marks): "Search topic" site:www.sitename.com This generates results only from the specified site.
- Sometimes to omit results, adding a minus (-) sign and url addresses for unwanted sites can result in higher-relevance hits (or at least higher relevance hits per Wikipedia's notability standards, to omit sites that aren't valid for demonstrating topic notability) – e.g. "Search topic" -siteexample.com.