Using Google Search Operators More Effectively
Google is the king of the web search sites out there. It is also used by millions of peopleto find what they need on the Internet. However, despite its wide use, Google is still not used to its full potential by most people. Many use it only to do basic search, while Google is capable of much more.
It may take some time to get these details, but it is important to learn how to use Google effectively. Each trick you can learn about searching can save you a lot of time down the road. It is much easier to find the information you need if you understand how Google works, and how it displays this information as requested.
Moreover, the less time you spend searching for information, the more you will spend on really reading and using the information you're searching for. The whole idea of the Internet is to make our lives easier, instead of spend a long time combing through data.
Search Operators
The main feature of Google is standard search: you type the term you are interested in, click the search button, and Google returns the search results that best match your query. This is the way that millions of people perform search on this web site.
However, few people know that Google can return you much more information. You just need to ask for it. An to ask for more information with Google, you can use search operators, which will make your life much easier.
The way you can ask Google for more specific information is by using the commands that it provides. For example, few people know that you can get an exact phrase by type it inside quotes. This will tell Google servers that you are only interested in a particular phrase, and not in any page that has these works in different orders. So, if you want to search for "stock market", this results will not show pages that have these two words in different positions.
Examples of Search Operators
There are several search operators that you can use with Google. The one that I find to be most useful is the "site:" operator. You can use the keyword "site:", followed by the name of a web domain, to find information contained specifically in that web site.
Suppose for example that you want to find a list of jobs available at Google. You can do that easily by using the term your are searching (jobs), together with the "site:" keyword, and the domain google.com. Your query will then look something like this:
jobs site:google.com
You can use the same strategy in any web sites. For example, if you want to see how many times I mentioned for example "googlepack" in thea website, you can look for
googlepack site:mywebsite.com
Which will return several pages, all containing some information about the keywords that you typed.
List of operators
This is an incomplete list of operators, with the ones that I find most useful. There are really many operators that can be used, and Google is adding more frequently. This is just a sample of what is possible, and how it can improve the quality of your searches.
allintitle: this operator allows one to find the web sites with the words you are looking for in the title. It helps to focus you search even more, since these are supposed to be specialized websites.
link: this operator, when followed by a web site address, will return all the pages that link to that site. It is good if you are trying to find who links to your page, for example.
allinurl: this is similar to allintitle, but it will find the pages where the keyword you are looking for appears in the URL, that is, the complete address of the site you are looking for.
define: this one can be used to find specifically a definition for the keyword you want to search. This will usually return information from dictionaries, and other reference material available on the web.
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