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A Guide to Searching with Google

The 800 lb Gorilla

Google is a behemoth, no doubt. The company has been around since 1996 – and has only gotten stronger from it’s original conception as a college thesis that would illustrate the effectiveness of a search engine that would analyze the connections between websites to better organize search results. The result of this labor, 10 years later, is a search engine with one heckuva market share. Google is also known for it’s various other satellite operations. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps, Okrut, and Youtube are all very popular popular parts of Google that only add more to the company’s popularity.

It’s true that Google has come under fire recently due to various privacy concerns – mainly originating with objections raised about the storing of search history. With an unofficial motto of “Don’t Be Evil”, it’s very hard to complain about the search giant. When Google makes searching so fun, easy, and powerful – as you’re soon to see.

In This article I’m going to show you how the search giant has worked in various little shortcuts into their system so you can search more effectively for the things you are looking for. So join me, our humble host, for a look at how searching with Google can be made easy. (Well, really – it already is easy, but I assure you, it gets better.)

Tips for Searching

A Google search is a very versatile and powerful tool. The nice folks at Google have created an interface that allows users the ability to almost fully customize the results received. Google gives the power of the tool to the user, in that the search allows the user the ability to specify the level of specificity that the search employs. (Say that 10 times fast!) A standard search, for those unknowing of the power you have access to while using Google, would generally consist of a simple line of text. A standard search could be a statement, question, or even a single word. Google will find results. However, those results aren’t guaranteed to be what you want. So you, as a responsible user should learn how to assist Google for the purpose of better results, and for the purpose of cutting down the time it takes for you to find the page you’re searching for.

You can assist Google by using the engine’s special search syntax, which will allow you to narrow down your results, and increase the amount of results that would be interesting to you. Sounds good? It should – lets take a look at some of the more common bits that I use the most often. I will cover some major modifiers, and simple usage examples.

Number Range

This feature allows you to specify a period of time that is associated with your search. Perhaps you want to know about the middle ages, or the space program – adding a date range would certainly aide your search, no?

Usage:

good emo bands 1990..1999

Here, you can see, at the end of this search string, the popper usage of this feature. This yields results about ‘good emo bands’ in the 10 year period I have specified.

intext:

The intext modifier allows us to search for a phrase inside of the page’s body. This ignores the text associated with hyper links.

Usage:

intext:good emo bands

The usage of this modifier is fairly straightforward, as is the case with most others, including the next few below.

intitle:

This is a very useful modifier to have available while searching. This modifier allows you to restrict your search to a web page’s title. Blog articles any one?

Usage:

intitle:good emo bands

inurl:

This modifier searches the URLs of web pages indexed by Google. A handy tool indeed.

Usage:

inurl:good emo bands

site:

This allows you to limit the search to a specific domain. You may also want to either include or exclude(We’ll cover exclusion and inclusion in a second) results from this domain.

Usage:

site:wikipedia.com
site:com

The first usage will limit the search to the domain wikipedia.com. The second usage seen here limits the results to .com domain names. This can be replaced with edu, or net if desired.

filetype:

This will return results that match the specified file type. This has various uses that range from tracking down pdf documents, to finding mp3 files.

Usage:

good emo bands filetype:html

This will show results contained within documents with HTML extensions only.

Synonyms!

Google also has implemented a feature that has Google search for synonyms to certain words contained within your search string. This is especially helpful when your search contains commonly used adjectives, like ours does. This feature is used by placing the tilde(~) in front of the commonly used word in order to include it’s synonyms in the results. Who wants to exclude decent results based on adjective choice? I don’t!

Usage:

~good emo bands

Phrase Search

This allows you to search for a specific bit of text, and only that specific bit of text. If a page doesn’t contain every single letter in your string, it isn’t included in the results

Usage:

“good emo bands”

The OR operand

The usage of the or operator specifies more than one word that is just as acceptable as the other. I like to think of this as a more precise extension of the synonym feature.

Usage:

“good emo” bands OR groups

This will search for both good emo bands, and good emo groups.

Exclusion (and inclusion)

This is very important. The use of the minus operator(-) will only show results that exclude whatever you place next to the minus sign. This can be used in conjunction with a single word, multiple words (surrounded by double quotes), or any of the above modifiers. This is a very powerful tool, and it’s functionality is extended when used with the addition operator (+) that tells Google to do just the opposite of the minus operator. This is the single feature that I find myself using the most.

Usage:

+”good emo bands” -1990..1999
good emo bands -site:wikipedia.com

The first usage returns sites that only contain the full string provided, but not results that focus on that specific 10 year period. The second usage excludes the site wikipedia from the results. As you can see, this functionality is both very diverse and very useful to the end user.

Show me the money!

To demonstrate the power of Google’s special search syntax, we’ll start with a general search that will reveal some general results:

good emo bands

This search reveals approximately 609,000 results. That’s a lot of stuff to sift through, and just looking at the first page of results I can see that the results are all over the place. Lets see if we can’t narrow it down a little bit, Using some of our newly learned operators, and modifiers.

~good emo bands OR groups 1990..1999 -1980..1989 -site:myspace.com -site:youtube.com

This simple example narrows our results to about 31000. That’s pretty good if you ask me. This is just a quick little example of course, I’m sure more time could be spent devising a better search string, but this will suit our purposes just fine.

I hope you’ll make use of a few of these modifiers/operators. Happy searching!

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