Google Power User Tips: Query Operators, Stephan Spencer, Search Engine Land (Aug 5)
Stephan Spencer admits that he likes to show off his knowledge of Google query operators. He presents a table of the operators with a short description, and a longer discussion of many of them and some shortcuts.
But not all operators are equally useful, and some are of limited to no use.
For example, searching for keywords intext limits the search to words in the text. Why would you do that when Google automatically looks in title and body text? There is no advantage.
Using inurl: to look for a word used in the domain, directory path, and filename can by used surgically to parse through a site. Otherwise, intitle is stronger.
In fact the biggest bang for the effort comes from:
intitle: - look for primary concept in the title and other words elsewhere - one of the best strategies in my book.
allintitle: - same as using the Advanced Search form - good on names, places, popular topics - but keep the keywords down to 2 or 3.
site: - search a high level domain - but for more punch, search a known organization domain. If you are looking for the registrar at University of Toronto, you could use site:utoronto.ca registrar.
inurl: - occasionally and in a very specialized way - have to know the patterns in directory naming.
filetype: - especially to restrict to pdf files.
For shortcuts, certainly define: for definitions taken from glossaries on the web, or entering an address to get a map are good to know.
Stocks - for US exchanges, and phonebook for US numbers.
Some others aren't needed - daterange - firstly, dates are abominably bad, and secondly, it's far easier to use the new date selection in the left rail.
WebSearchGuide has shorter guides to using syntax in Google. See the comparison chart for Google, Bing, Yahoo and the Google Search Guide.
Posted by Gwen at August 5, 2010 08:52 PM