There are several other ways to use Google. Many advanced search techniques are helpful and easy to use. Use search commands to get the results you expect and avoid showing unnecessary items. We’ve compiled a list of all these little-known Google search operators below.

What to Know

  • Enter define:term for a definition; use OR between terms to find either; use quotes (") to find an exact match.Don’t use a space after the colon, and feel free to join multiple commands in a single search.Remember that multiple commands mean fewer results, which can sometimes be good and can sometimes be bad.

It’s easy to use these secret Google search operators with your regular search terms. You’ll see in the examples below that there are really just minor adjustments you need to make to dig deeper and find the stuff you’re really after.

Tips for Using Advanced Google Search Commands

Avoid putting spaces between the symbols and words in your search term. For example, site:lifewire.com will yield different results than site: lifewire.com.

There are other search techniques that you might find on other websites that no longer work. Some examples include phonebook, info, blogurl, location, and link.

You can combine multiple Google Search operators to make use of more than one at once. Here’s an example where we’re requesting a definition, but we want the results to not only be restricted to just websites with the ORG top-level domain, but also to explicitly exclude any results from these two domains and URLs with a certain word:

define:hypothesis site:org -site:dictionary.com -site:yourdictionary.com -inurl:wiki

Below is another, where we’re looking for a PDF manual for a specific kind of router on Linksys’ website. Just the domain search provides several tens of thousands of results, but it eventually dropped to fewer than 50 with the other commands added,

filetype:pdf “user guide” wrt54gl site:linksys.com

Be careful how many of these commands you use in one query. If you stuff the search box full of several, you’re bound to end up with fewer results. This can be good to a certain point (that’s the idea behind them, after all), but eventually, you’ll run out of results and have to step a few of them back.

Instead, it’s better to start with fewer, and slowly build up more as you realize which kind of results you’re not interested in seeing.

Google Advanced Search is a visual way to run some of these search commands, and others. Just enter what you’re after in the appropriate boxes, and pick things like the language, file type, or last update date from the menus provided on that page.

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