Google Search doesn't give you a lot of query flexibility. The tradeoff of course is that you get to search the entire web in milliseconds.
- MIT has a great cheatsheet of search operators.
- Dan Russell, a search scientist at Google, maintains the Search Research blog, which is full of interesting challenges and tips about changes to Google's search functionality.
- If you don't like memorizing the keywords, Google has a useful-enough advanced search interface.
Most of these come from the MIT cheatsheet. The others from Dan Russell's blog. Note that the MIT sheet has a few things that are deprecated (e.g. + and ~), according to Russell's blog, so they aren't included below:
| example | description |
|---|---|
trump clinton -donald -hillary -election |
Find pages with the words "trump" and "clinton", but not "donald" nor "hillary" nor "election" |
"the chickens can fly" |
Find pages with the exact sequence, "the chickens can fly" |
"the * can fly" |
Find pages with this exact phrase, in which * represents any sequence of words |
site:npr.org chickens |
Find pages with "chickens" on the npr.org domain |
filetype:xls invoice |
Find files that end in .xls with the word "invoice" |
inurl:hello |
Find pages with the word "hello" in the URL |
allinurl:stanford sports |
Find pages with the words "stanford" and "sports" in the URL |
kittens AROUND(4) jupiter |
The word "kittens" within 4 words of "jupiter" -- note that AROUND is case-sensitive |
cache:www.latimes.com |
A shortcut for viewing Google's cached version of www.latimes.com |
Typing
calculatorinto Google also brings up a calculator which is very useful.