Got this google search tips mail. sharing for everyone's benefit.
Here are some search syntax basics and advanced tricks for Google.com. You might know most of these, but if you spot a new one, it may come in handy in future searches.
* A quote/ phrase search can be written with both quotations ["like this"] as well as a minus in-between words, [like-this].
* Google didn't always understand certain special characters like [#], but now they do; a search for [C#], for example, yields meaningful results (a few years ago, it didn't). This doesn't mean you can use just any character; e.g. entering [t.] and [t-] and [t^] will always return the same results.
* Google allows 32 words within the search query (some years ago, only up to 10 were used, and Google ignored subsequent words). You rarely will need so many words in a single query - [just thinking of such a long query is a hard thing to do, as this query with twenty words shows] - however, it can come in handy for advanced searching... especially as a developer using the Google API.
* You can find synonyms of words. E.g. when you search for [house] but you want to find "home" too, search for [~house]. To get to know which synonyms the Google database stores for individual words, simply use the minus operator to exclude synonym after synonym (they will always show as bold in the SERPs, the search engine result pages). Like this: [~house -house -home -housing -floor].
* To see a really large page-count (possibly, the Google index size, though one can only speculate about that), search for [* *].
* Google has a lesser known "numrange" operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2000..2005] (that's two dots inbetween two numbers) will find 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on until 2005.
* Google's define-operator allows you to look up word definitions. For example, [define:css] yields "Short for Cascading Style Sheets" and many more explanations. You can trigger a somewhat "softer" version of the define-operator by entering "what is something", e.g. [what is css].
* Google has some exciting back-end AI to allow you to find just the facts upong entering simple questions or phrases like [when was Einstein born?] or [einstein birthday] (the answer to both of these queries is "Albert Einstein - Date of Birth: 14 March 1879"). This feature was introduced April this year and is called Google Q&A. (See some of the various working Q&A sample queries to get a feeling for what's possible.)
* Google allows you to find backlinks by using the link-operator, e.g. [link:blog.outer-court.com] for this blog. The new Google Blog Search supports this operator as well. In fact, when Google's predecessor started out as Larry Page's "BackRub" in the 1990s, finding backlinks was its only aim! However, not all backlinks are shown in Google today, at least not in web search. (It's argued that Google does this on purpose to prevent reverse-engineering of its PageRank algorithm.)
* Often when you enter a question mark at the end of the query, like when you type [why?], Google will advertise its pay-for-answer service Google Answers.
* There a "sport" called Google Hacking. Basically, curious people try to find unsecure sites by entering specific, revealing phrases. A special web site called the Google Hacking Database is dedicated to listing these special queries.
* Google searches for all of your words, whether or not you write a "+" before them (I often see people write queries [+like +this], but it's not necessary). Unless, of course, you use Google's or-operator. It's an upper-case [OR] (lower-case won't work and is simply searching for occurrences of the word "or"), and you can also use parentheses and the "" character. [Hamlet (pizza coke)] will find pages containing the word (or being linked to with the word) "Hamlet" and additionally containing at least one of the two other words, "pizza" or "coke".
* Not all Google services support the same syntax. Some services don't allow everything Google web search allows you to enter (or at least, it won't have any effect), and sometimes, you can even enter more than in web search (e.g. [insubject:test] in Google Groups). The easiest thing to find out about these operators is to simply use the advanced search and then check what ends up being written in the input box.
* Sometimes, Google seems to understand "natural language" queries and shows you so-called "onebox" results. This happens for example when you enter [goog], [weather new york, ny], [new york ny] or [war of the worlds] (for this one, movie times, move rating and other information will show).
* Not all Googles are the same! Depending on your location, Google will forward you to a different country-specific version of Google with potentially different results to the same query. A search for [site:stormfront.org] from the US will yield hundreds of thousands of results, whereas the same search from Germany (at least if you don't change the default redirect to Google.de) returns... zilch. Yes, Google does at times agree to country-specific censorship, like in Germany, France (Google web search), or China (Google News).
* Sometimes, Google warns you about its results, especially when they might seem like promoting hate sites (of course, only someone misunderstanding how Google works could think it's them promoting hate sites). Enter [jew], and you will see a Google-sponsored link titled "Offensive Search Results" leading to this explanation.
* For some search queries, Google uses its own ads to offer jobs. Try entering [work at Google] and take a look at the right-hand advertisement titled e.g. "Work at Google Europe" (it turns out, at the moment, Google Switzerland is hiring
* For some of the more popular "Googlebombed" results, like when you enter [failure] and the first hit is the biography of George W. Bush, Google displays explanatory ads titled "Why these results?".
* While Google doesn't do real Natural Language Processing yet, this is the ultimate goal for them and other search engines. A little What-If Video [WMV] illustrates how this could be useful in the future.
* Some say that whoever turns up first for the search query [president of the internet] is, well, the President of the internet. (I'm applying as well, and you can feel free to support me with this logo.)
* Google doesn't have "stop words" anymore. Stop words traditionally are words like [the], [or] and similar which search engines tended to ignore. Sometimes, when you enter e.g. [to be or not to be], Google even decides to show some phrase search results in the middle of the page (separated by a line and information that these are phrase search results).
* There once was an easter-egg in the Google Calculator that made Google show "42" when you entered [The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything]. If I'm not mistaken, this feature has disappeared and now displays a more reasonable (but less funny) definition of the concept of Douglas Adams' galactical joke. As I've been alerted in the forum, the easter egg only works lower-case.
* You can use the wildcard operator in phrases. This is helpful for finding song texts - let's say you forgot a word or two, but you remember the gist, as in ["love you twice as much * oh love * *"] - and similar tasks.
* You can use the wildcard character without searching for anything specific at all, as in this phrase search: ["* * * * * * *"].
* Even though www.googl.com is nothing but a "typosquatter" (someone reserving a domain name containing a popular misspelling) and search queries return very different results than Google, the site is still getting paid by Google - because it uses Google AdSense.
* you feel like restricting your search to university servers, you can write e.g. [c-tutorial site:.edu] to only search on the "edu" domain (you can also use Google Scholar). This works for country-domains like "de" or "it" as well.
* Limiting by date can be a problem. Genie Tyburski and I wrote an article about this last year. Date searching is reliable only when Google can consistently identify them as it does with Usenet message (Google Groups) and news (Google News).
* A potentially useful way to limit the scope of a search is to use the syntax for file type (filetype:). For example, filetype:ppt google finds mention of Google in PowerPoint slides. Other formats include .pdf (Adobe Acrobat), .doc (Word) and .xls (Excel). Other search engines also let you query these formats.
* You can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard. Example: "George * Bush" finds George W. Bush. Example: "To * * * to be" finds "To be or not to be". I've used this strategy to find email addresses: "email * *
* Some documents are not completely indexed by Google. Indexing of the text in Web pages stops after 101kb (For PDF, it's 120kb.)
* Google limits the number of search terms to ten.
* Not every Google version offers all of Google's features. For example, Google via the Washington Post does not offer the cache or similar page options.
* Finding out who links to a Web page is popular. You use the link (link:) syntax. However, you cannot limit the search using additional syntax. For example, you cannot discover which .edu sites link to the home page of The Virtual Chase. The search link:www.virtualchase.com site:edu does not work. AllTheWeb, on the other hand, lets you add additional syntax to a reverse link search.
* For the most part, search engines display one result per domain. For example, enter "competitive intelligence" "new york". Google returns two listings from SCIP. To see additional pages from the same domain -- scip.org, you have to click the "more results" link.
* Search terms are linked to dictionary definitions via Dictionary.com. Find the link near the top of the page in the blue bar. Other engines also offer this feature.
* Using Google UncleSam, limits your search to material from government sites.
* Findlaw also offers a focused version of Google. The filter boosts the relevancy of legal and government information. See LawCrawler.
* Google is wonderful, but it is not the only Web search tool. Take a look at Teoma, AllTheWeb and Vivisimo.
* Finally, learn about and bookmark specialized or, as a professor at Penn State calls them, niche databases. This can save you time and aggravation. Examples include the new keyword searchable version of The Wayback Machine or the even newer SMEALSearch, which indexes freely available, scholarly business information.
Google Search Tips (Ultimate Google Guide)
First Things First
In this Google guide I'll show you some less-known google operators and search tips. Please note that since this advanced operators are sometimes used by spam-bot, black hat seos and other people google does not loves, you may bump in 403-Access denied screens like the one I showed to you in my Google hates Doughnuts (and Advanced Search Strings) article.Don't be scared if this happens, nothing is wrong with you / your pc / your search, is just google that it's a little nervous
Things to Know
1. google is not case sensitive: searching for doughnut is the same as DoughNuT
2. search operators are case sensitive: searching for doughnuts OR donuts uses OR as the google operator, while doughnuts or donuts does not.
3. google default is to search for pages that include all of your search terms. Also the order of your search term is somehow relevant.
4. google excludes common words (also called stop words) like "I" , "the" etc.
5. some operators can be combined, while others must be used alone.
Basic Operators
+
forces words to be included in search results. Useful with stop words that otherwise will be discarded
-
prevents a search term to show in results, for example searching for doughnut -cream can help you to avoid creamy doughnuts
OR
returns documents with one of the given terms, like doughnut OR donut. You can also use instead of OR: doughnut donut
" "
using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase (including stop words), try "doughnut at midnight" and doughnut at midnight (actually, using quotes is similar, but not equals, to doughnut-at-midnight ... it would be interesting to know what is the exact difference in SERP)
~
allow to search also for synonyms of the given word. searching for doughnut ~tips finds also pages with the word help or guide etc.
*
means every word. try "doughnuts with *"
..
Used to search in a range of numbers, "2..20 doughnuts" will find pages containing "I eat 3 doughnuts a day" and "I'll never eat more than 15 doughnuts in a month"
This operators can be combined to create advanced queries, for example "I eat 1..100 doughnut OR doughnuts OR donut OR donuts each *"
Advanced google operators
daterange:
Returns documents modified in the given time interval. Dates should be entered in julian format (so geeky, but a bit unusable).Using doughnuts daterange:2454091-2454101 you can find who talked about doughnuts in the last ten days of 2006
filetype:
returns links to documents with the given file type.For example searching for doughnuts filetype:java will find portable and object-oriented doughnuts.Currently officially supported file types are pdf, ps, wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku, lwp, mw, xls, ppt, doc, wks, wps, wdb, wri, rtf, swf, ans, txt, but other are supported as well, like xml, cpp, java etc.
site:
restricts the results to the given domain. site:mapelli.info will find all indexed page on www.mapelli.info, while site:mapelli.info doughnuts will find all doughnuts-related pages on
www.mapelli.info .
update:
you can use the site operator also to find your supplemental results using this query: site:www.mapelli.info *** -sljktf. (taken from an intresting article about Google Supplemental Index Results by Aaron Wall)
cache:
shows the cached version of given webpage. Other words in the query will be highlighted in the returned page, try cache:www.mapelli.info doughnuts
link:
lists webpages that link to the given webpage. link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut will list webpages with links pointing to wikipedia's voice for Doughnut
related:
returns pages that google somehow thiks are related to the given page. Not always accurate.
info:
returns some informations about the given web page. Typically website and description.
define:
returns the definition of a given word. Try define:doughnuts (in case you are an alien and you don't know what a Doughnut is 8)
phonebook:
search in residential phone book. sample: phonebook:smith Los Angeles
stoks:
returns stock info: try stocks:goog
weather:
weather informations for the given city. weather:los angeles
movie:
returns all movies related to the search term given. Sample: movie:doughnuts
You can also find movies by locations: movie:nyc , movie 10015
flights
you can search for flights inside USA using the airport code (does not work for every airport). sample: jfk lax
SEO-oriented Operators
allintitle:
Search for documents with the given words in their title. allintitle:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with title containing 'doughnuts' and 'chocolate'. This operator cannot be combined with others.
intitle:
Search for documents with the first word after the intitle operator in their title.
intitle:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with title containing 'doughnuts' and talking about chocolate. Note that the word 'chocolate' is not necessarily in the title.
allintext:
Search for documents with the given words in their text. allintext:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with text containing 'doughnuts' and 'chocolate'.This operator cannot be combined with others.
intext:
Search for documents with the first word after the intext operator in their text. intext:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with text containing 'doughnuts' and talking about chocolate. Note that the word 'chocolate' is not necessarily in the text
allinurl:
Search for documents with the given words in their url.
allinurl:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with url containing 'doughnuts' and 'chocolate'. This operator cannot be combined with others.
inurl:
Search for documents with the first word after the inurl operator in their url. inurl:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with url containing 'doughnuts' and talking about chocolate. Note that the word 'chocolate' is not necessarily in the text
allinanchor:
Search for documents with the given words in an anchor. allinurl:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with anchor text containing 'doughnuts' and 'chocolate'. This operator cannot be combined with others.
inanchor:
Search for documents with the first word after the operator in an anchor. inanchor:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with anchor containing 'doughnuts' and talking about chocolate. Note that the word 'chocolate' is not necessarily in an anchor.
Google Calculator Guide
+ - * / % ^
you can use Google as a calculator,
using standard symbols,
for example3+2 returns 5
4-1 returns 3
6*8 returns 48
15/5 returns 3
3^2 returns 9 (3 raised to power 2)
5%2 returns 1 (the remainder after division)
sqrt,nth root ofx
sqrt(49) returns 7, if you need non-square roots you can use for example 3th root of 27.
sin, cos, arctan, tan...
google calculator supports various trigonometic functions, expecting a radians value, that can be expressed also using the pi constant: sin(pi/2), tan (2/3*pi)
ln
returns natural (base e) logarithm:
log
returns base 10 logarithm: log(100)
!
returns n factorial: 3!
Numbers can be entered also in hexadecimal, octal and binary base, using 0x, 0o and 0b prefixes, for example 5 +0xf+0b1001
Conversions
Google supports a lot of conversion tools, here is a small guide:
in degrees / in radians
you can convert radians to degrees: pi/2 in degrees or convert degrees into radians: 90 degrees in radians
in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal
you can convert to each of the given bases: 16 in hex , 16 in octal, 16 in binary, 0×11 in decimalyou can also use 2007 in roman numerals (in case you're building a temple and you need to know how to write the year on it)
distance conversions
you can use 100miles in km , 1m in mm, but also 200000 km in light-second etc
speed, time, temperature
just some samples:100mph in kph1 month in seconds280 kelvin in celsius50 fahrenheit in celsius
currency
3 EURO in $ or 3 euros in dollars]
cooking
I love this...3 teaspoons in oz
1 cup + 1 tablespoon in teaspoon
There are a lot of others possible conversions, just try!
Blogsearch
Have a look at my google blogsearch tips
Resources
google search tips posters
google cheatsheet
google search reference
google calculator reference
Possibly Related Posts
Bonus Search Tip: Finding mp3 files with Google
Change Title of Your Older Posts to Target Popular Search Terms
Google Blogsearch Tips (And a Little Wordpress Hack)
Here's a small list of tips that may help you use Google search better.
1. If you're on Google's homepage, click on "I'm feeling lucky" if you're searching for the site of a company or the official site of a product. "I'm feeling lucky" sends you to the first search result and saves you one click.
Example: use this for [bmw], [France Telecom], but not for general terms like [used cars], [mobile phones history] because for these queries you'll want to visit more than one page.
2. If you're not sure how to spell a word, or if you remember only the first letters of a word, use Google Suggest. You'll find it in Firefox 2 search box, in Google Toolbar or at its homepage.
3. Google shows direct answers for simple questions above the search results. When you try to find a simple fact, enter you query this way: "Italy population", and not as a complicated question like "How many people are in Italy?" because you might confuse Google.
If Google doesn't show an answer, try to imagine a page that answers your question. How would the answer sound like for a question like: "What is the fastest animal on land?". Of course, the page might contain this sentence: "[some animal] is the fastest animal on land".
Build your query this way:
* surround it by quotes, to obtain only results that contain that phrase
* instead of the answer, use a star for each word of the expected answer
For example, "* is the fastest animal on land".
4. The order of your keywords is important, so you'll get different results for "search history" and "history search". Type only the important keywords, in a logical order.
5. If you search for a file, you could:* add filetype:[extension] for Office documents, text files, PDFs (for example: divine comedy filetype:pdf)* use inurl: operator if you actually know the name of the file (for example: inurl:divina-comedia.pdf)* exploit the standard format of Apache directory listings by adding intitle:"index of" parent directory to your query (for example: bigfix.exe intitle:"index of" parent directory).
6. You won't find information about a breaking news in Google search, so it's a good idea to try Google News and Blog Search. If the event is really important, Google will show results from Google News at the top of the page, in a OneBox.
7. Very few people use this option, even though it's really useful. If you found a good page, and you want to see related pages, click on the "Similar pages" next to the search result. Google will show 30 high-quality sites on the same topic. It's a good way to discover interesting sites.
8. If you found a site using Google search, but you don't remember too much about it, try Google Search History. You can browse all your search queries and the pages visited from Google, bookmark interesting sites and more.
9. When you want to explore a domain you aren't familiar with, a Wikipedia page is a good place to start. Add "wiki" or "wikipedia" to your Google search query to find the top results from Wikipedia. You can restrict your search to a site, by adding site:domainname to a query (for Wikipedia, you should add site:en.wikipedia.org).
10. Google doesn't give you a feed for search results, but Web Alerts sends you email updates with the latest relevant Google results for a query.
