Almost anyone with access to Internet would have used Google Search at some point of time, but how many of us have been using it effectively? How many of us know there are some pretty cool tricks to make our search more accurate and crisp?
Google provides us with what are called "search operators" which can be used to do some very specific, targeted searches. I will share a few of them here, hope you find it interesting!
Search for the exact word/words
Use double quotes when you want to search for a specific word or set of words.
For example, searching for "water shortage" will return all pages that has the exact phrase "water shortage" .
Search for content with forcing an match for certain word/words
Use + when you want to add a particular term and force an exact match in the search results.
For example, sports +cricket will return all sports pages containing details about cricket.
Search for content excluding certain words
This is the exact opposite of the previous category. Instead of +, we will use - here. This is used when we want to exclude a particular term in the search results.
For example, sports -cricket will return all sports pages which doesn't have any reference to cricket.
Search for pages that has some content between 2 words
Use * to search for pages that has some content between 2 words.
For example, "Indian * star" will return pages with content such as "Indian Bollywood star", 'Indian TV comedy star", "Indian boxing star" etc.
Search for content on a specific website
Site is a very useful operator when we wan to search a website for some specific content.
For example, if you want to find the review for the movie The Dark Knight on rediff.com, the search string would be site:rediff.com The Dark Knight review
Search for the cached version of a site
Cache operator is used to return the most recently cached version of a site on Google. Please note that this cached version may not be the latest version of the site. This is particularly useful when a site is down but we will still want to check out some page on the site.
For example, cache:ndtv.com will return the last cached version of the site ndtv.com.
Search for content between specific dates
Google provides the after and before operators to find content between 2 specific dates.
For example, if you want to find all content related to Sachin between 12th and 14th March 2021, use
Sachin after:2021-03-12 before:2021-03-14
Search for content with specific keywords in the URL
The inurl operator provides the ability to search for a particular word within a site URL.
For example, inurl:2021 cricket, returns all pages on cricket that has 2021 in the URL.
Search for pages with specific file types
Another useful operator to search for target pages with a particular file format (such as pdf, txt, csv, etc.) is the filetype operator.
For example, if you want to search for PDF documents related to Blockchain , use Blockchain filetype:pdf
There are many other operators that can further refine your search and you can find plenty of resources online to study about them. This article is just to get you started with the basics, and I hope you got to learn something new from it! Happy Googling!!
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