My favourite Google search options you didn’t know

August 06 2010

Finding stuff on the 'net can be made a whole lot easier if you know the a few handy search operators.

"<word 1> <word 2>" Performs a search for the phrase "word 1 word 2". Not including the parentheses will search for word 1 and word 2 somewhere in the page, but not necessarily together (the typical search).
<word 1> OR <word 2> Will search for occurrences of word 1 or word 2 but not both.
-<word> Excludes a particular word.
E.G. money -poor
~<word> Performs a synonym search.  E.G. ~auto loans will search for truck loans, car loans, etc.
<#1>…<#2> Finds in a range. E.G. laptop cost $1000…$15000 seaches for laptops that cost between $1000 and $1500 dollars.
inurl:<text> Returns only pages with a url (address) containing text.
intitle:<text> Returns only pages where the title element contains text.
site:<url> Only search the site specified by url for the keywords supplied.
E.G. funny site:www.turrbalterror.com
define:<word> Finds the definition of word. Basically turns Google into a dictionary.
filetype:<ext> Returns results that meet the supplied file type extension. 
E.G. money filetype:pdf will return all PDF documents containing the word "money".  This one is great for searching source code :)
info:<url> Returns information about the supplied url (address)

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