Some useful & powerful Google Operators / “Commands”
For most of us, Google is the search engine of choice.
We use Google to do research or when we are looking for something in the web. When we want to do a search, we type the keyword/s and then click “Enter”. That’s how you do a search, right? Right. But a lot of people do not know that Google lets you make use of operator commands. Operator commands are special query words that have special meaning in the Google database which does a “unique” kind of search.
So here are some useful and powerful(if used correct and some times in combination) Google operators:
Weather London
Shows the weather in the location specified.
Phrase search ( “” )
By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change.
Search within a specific website ( site: )
Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ Design site:geeksare.in ] will return pages about Design but only from GeeksAre.In . The simpler queries [ Design geeksare.in ] or [ Design Geeks Are In ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention Geeks Are In. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ Design site:.org ] will return results only from a .org domain and [ Design site:.gr ] will return results only from Greek sites.
Terms you want to exclude (-)
Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ‘site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.
Fill in the blanks (*)
The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google’s products. The query [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.
Search exactly as is (+)
Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or Greece history for the query [ gr history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don’t really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don’t add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.
The OR operator
Google’s default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type ‘OR’ in ALL CAPS). For example, [ iPhone 2007 OR 2008 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ iPhone 2007 2008 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)
movie:Manchester
Shows a list of movies, showtime and cinemas in the location specified.
site:digg.com
Lists the pages indexed in Google for the specified domain.
allintitle:web design Cyprus
Shows pages that only have the keywords specified in the page title, in the example above pages that only contain web, design and Cyprus in no particular order. To apply order simply place quotation marks around the keywords during the query.
allinurl:free vector images
Works the same way as the allintitle: operator only the keywords specified are matched to the URL instead of the page title.
Search for synonyms ( ~ )
Example: great ~resources for web designers, will return also results of “resources” synonyms.
filetype:pdf
Restricts the search only to PDF documents.
inanchor:“Cool movies”
The ‘inanchor’: operator searches for your specified term in the text of a page that is highlighted as a link.
related:www.bbc.co.uk
The ‘related’: operator will show websites/results related and or similar to the specified domain.
Exceptions
Search is rarely absolute. Search engines use a variety of techniques to imitate how people think and to approximate their behavior. As a result, most rules have exceptions. For example, the query [ for better or for worse ] will not be interpreted by Google as an OR query, but as a phrase that matches a (very popular) comic strip. Google will show calculator results for the query [ 34 * 87 ] rather than use the ‘Fill in the blanks’ operator. Both cases follow the obvious intent of the query.
Exceptions to ‘Every word matters’
- Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.
- Synonyms might replace some words in your original query. (Adding + before a word disables synonyms.)
- A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word ‘overhead.’
Punctuation that is not ignored
- Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
- The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
- The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the – and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
- The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].
