Begin your Google search by entering your keywords.

• Place phrases in double quotes. Words enclosed in double quotes will appear together as one term in all returned documents. For example, if you are looking for information on communist organizations during the Cold War, your search might look like this: communist "Cold War" organizations. If you do not place the terms in quotes, your results will include all documents with the words "cold" and "war," which may not pertain to the "Cold War."

• If you have keywords that can be used interchangeably such as "physicians" and "doctors," insert the word "OR" between the terms. Google will scan the web page for all occurrences of either word. Note, the word "OR" must be capitalized.

• Remember to search for a word's variations such as different parts of speech or the plural. For example, if you were looking for World War II diaries, your search might look like this: "World War II diary OR diaries". Similarly, if you are looking for information on polio vaccinations, your search might look like this: "polio vaccine OR vaccination OR vaccinate OR vaccinated".

• You can eliminate irrelevant terms that often appear in your results by adding a minus sign directly before that term. For example, if you want information on labor unions but not the Teamsters, then your search might look like this: "labor union -Teamsters".

• Google ignores many common words such as "and," "the," "of," and "how," as well as single digits and single letters. If one of these words is important to include in your search, insert a plus sign before that word so that Google will recognize it as a part of the search. For example, if you were searching for the song title, "Faith of Our Fathers," your search might look like this: "faith +of our fathers".