3 Best Tips before you do Google Searching again

Google queries are not case sensitive: Google doesn’t care if you type your query in lowercase letters (hackers), uppercase (HACKERS), camel case (hAcKeR), or psycho-case (haCKeR)—the word is always regarded the same way.This is especially important when you’researching things like source code listings, when the case of the term carries a great deal of meaning for the programmer.The one notable exception is the word or. When used as the Boolean operator, or must be written in uppercase, as OR.

Google wildcards: Google’s concept of wildcards is not the same as a programmer’s concept of wildcards. Most consider wildcards to be either a symbolic representation of any single letter (UNIX fans may think of the question mark) or any series of letters represented by an asterisk. This type of technique is called stemming. Google’s wildcard, the asterisk

(*), represents nothing more than a single word in a search phrase. Using an asterisk at the beginning or end of a word will not provide you any more hits than using the word by itself.

Google reserves the right to ignore you: Google ignores certain common words, characters, and single digits in a search.These are sometimes called stop words. When Google ignores any of your search terms, you will be notified on the results page, just below the query box. Some common stop words include who, where, what, the, a, or an. Curiously enough, the logic for word exclusion can vary from search to search.