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@dannguyen
Last active February 27, 2023 22:05
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Drafting a list of general search tips

Google-Fu

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.

Quickie Google cheatsheet

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
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ghost commented Sep 19, 2016

Typing calculator into Google also brings up a calculator which is very useful.

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