Web Search Garage

People

Not only can names be difficult to search when you're doing your research, but different institutions will express names in different ways. Library card catalog listings, for example, might list an author with their last name first, as will many bibliography formats. Court papers and other formal items of record might list someone's full name—first, middle, and last—even if they rarely use their full names themselves.

Treat the formatting of this kind as a variant of the Principle of Unique Language. If you format your search in the way that it's used in a certain kind of resource, then you'll get more results that are like that resource.

Let's take an example: Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time. If you do a Google search for ...