these work with Google's search engine, may work with others but not tested
-
"query"
- Double quotes are used to search for a specific phrase. If you were to search for, let's say,halloween in Nebraska
, not all the results will have that exact phrase. Instead, Google will treat those words as separate and show the results accordingly. However, if you do"halloween in Nebraska"
, only those results will show up that have the exact phrase. -
query -phrase
- Use this to exclude something from the results. For example, if I were to search forMicrosoft -Google
, that means I need results that talk about Microsoft without any reference to Google. -
intitle:query
- This can be used when you need to locate text in the title of an article. So doing a search forintitle:Windows 8 Start Screen
will show the articles that have this phrase in their title. -
site:query
- You may use this one when you want to restrict your search to a specific site. If you dosite:guidingtech.com
, it will only show posts from our blog. If you were to dogmail site:guidingtech.com
, it will show the posts about Gmail on Guiding Tech. -
filetype:
- This is for locating files. For instance,filetype:pdf
will return results that contain PDF files.
Tip: All the above operators can also be used in conjunction with each other. For example, you could do "Gmail" -Firefox to find posts about Gmail that exclude references to Firefox. Try different mashups! Be creative!
src: Guiding Tech