ARCHIVED: Refine your IU Search results

At Indiana University, IU Search is a search service based on Google Custom Search that you can use from the main IU Search page (search.iu.edu) or from the search box on any IU website that leverages Google Custom Search (for example, www.iu.edu, www.iub.edu, www.iupui.edu).

On the main IU Search page, to search for information about a particular IU campus, select from the drop-down list to the left of the search box.

To improve the effectiveness of your search, use the following modifiers and operators:

• Quotation marks: To search for a specific phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks; for example, entering "financial aid" runs a search for those exact words, in that exact order.
  Note:

  Use quotation marks carefully; sometimes including them in your search terms can cause useful results to be excluded; for example, entering "financial aid" may cause your search to miss useful results about "financial assistance" or "financial need".
• Hyphen: To exclude a word from your search query, put a hyphen ( - ) immediately before the word; for example, enter -lilly library to find results that include the word "library" but not the word "lilly" (for example, to exclude information about the Lilly Library).
• Site: To focus your search on a specific university site, use the site: operator; for example, to search only the IU College of Arts and Sciences site, add site:college.indiana.edu to your search query.

  Conversely, to exclude a specific site from your search, combine the hyphen ( - ) and the site: operator; for example, to exclude information found on the College of Arts and Sciences website, add -site:college.indiana.edu to your search query.

For more, see Refine web searches in the Google Search Help pages.