Posted on February 16th, 2017 by David Taplin
We all use Google to search the internet every day and we are all very used to just pumping in words and hitting ‘Google Search‘. We then end up sifting through many results to try and find what we are after.
This process can take several attempts with slight (or major, depending on the results you achieve) changes to the selection of keywords that you use to allow you to obtain the precise result you were after.
There is however a selection of ‘search operators’ or ‘syntax’ that will allow you to streamline your results without having to delve into the advanced search to produce relevant results and here is a list of some of the most useful.
Syntax / Symbol |
Purpose / Result |
|
+ |
Adding a plus (+) symbol in front of your search keywords will ensure that that particular keyword will definitely be included in the search results. For example the search term ‘car’ would be a very broad search however if you added ‘car +classic’ Google would display all websites with the words ‘car’ and ‘classic’ in the content |
|
– |
By placing a minus (-) symbol in front of your keywords will ensure that websites or pages without those particular words are eliminated from the search results. For example if you searched for the term ‘trainers -nike’ Google will return results that have the word ‘trainers’ in but not the word ‘nike’. You can also add the (-) symbol before websites to eliminate the search from that site as well, for example ‘trainers -site:wikipedia.org’ would carry out a search for trainers but will not search the site Wikipedia.org at all. |
|
@ |
By adding the (@) symbol before any keywords or phrases it will reveal results relating to social media tags. |
| # | By adding the (#) symbol before any keywords or phrases will result in the search bringing back trending topics, for example #beiber. |
| “ ” | By adding your search terms within “quotation marks” your search will return all pages with those exact terms in that order, for example ‘imagine all the people’ will return all pages that have the words ‘imagine all the people’ in that order. |
| * | Adding an asterisk as a placeholder for any unknown terms will take this to be a ‘wildcard’ which means it will return pages containing the sentence where the asterisks will have any words in their place. Example: a * in the hand is worth two in the * |
| .. | Adding two periods in between two separate sequential numbers will supply result pages being displayed showing results with all numbers in between those two sequential numbers. For example £10..£100 |
| ~ | Adding a ‘tilde’ to a search keyword tells Google that you want it to bring back synonyms for the term. |
| Site: | By having the ‘site:’ prefix a web address or URL then adding the keyword e.g. ‘site:bbc.com weather’ will return all pages and content related to ‘weather’ on the bbc.comwebsite. |
| Link: | By typing ‘link:’ then a web address in your search, you will receive a list of websites that link to that web address. |
| intitle: | Type ‘intitle:’ then add your keywords to search for web pages that that you chosen keyword within the title of the page. |
| Info: | By using this operator ‘info’ then adding a web address, will return all information about a certain domain. |
There are hundreds more syntax and cool search operators you can use to make your life easier on Search Engines, we will be writing another article on more complex syntax very soon.
If you have any queries or questions on our article then please get in touch with us.
