On several occasions, when I’ve researched a topic that has just hit the news, search engines have shown me nothing but news articles on commentary on that event. Usually it’s 20 versions of the same syndicated article. Finding background information becomes nearly impossible. Google’s weighting heavily favors recently added or changed pages.

Fortunately, if you know Google’s options well, there are ways to get around this. They also work with Startpage, which is an independent privacy-protecting front end to Google. I recommend Startpage, if only to avoid Google’s diddling with your search results based on what it knows about you. Startpage recently dropped its advanced search page, but you can still do everything it let you do.

The trick is the “before” parameter. Let’s say you want to find out about riots at the Capitol before the January 6 incident. You can enter the following:

capitol riot before:2021-01-05

The order is yyyy-mm-dd.

Or perhaps you want to find out about what happened after the fuss died down and most people forgot about an event. You can use the “after” parameter:

tropical storm henri after:2021-10-01

This isn’t nearly as reliable as “before,” though. A lot of pages get frequent updates without a significant change in their core content, and they’re likely to be picked up by an “after” search.

It’s often valuable to search just one website. Suppose you want to find official information about car registration in New Hampshire. You can cut down on the less relevant sites with the “site” parameter:

car registration site:nh.gov

Sometimes you have to tell Google you really mean the search term you entered. You’ve all seen search results where it condescendingly asks if you meant something else. You can put a + in front of each term, or you can put it in quotes. Quotes are useful for phrases. Google may still ignore what you want, but the results are usually a little better. For example, if a search for “filk music” gets you mostly results about folk music, try this:

+filk +music

Other search engines may not have this capability, or they may use a different syntax.

I hope these tips will help you to get more useful results in your research.