5 Incredibly Useful Google Search Operators You Should Know About

For the majority of us, searching on Google means typing the query in the search bar (or the address bar as most of the browsers these days let you search directly from there), and hitting the Enter/return key. That's how most of us search on Google. Doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do it. 

 

Google provides a number of search operators that make searching and filtering the results very easy. Learning them makes sense considering the time you'd end up spending on Google in your lifetime. Here are the 5 most useful of them:

 

1. "query" - Double quotes are used to search for a specific phrase. If you were to search for, let's say, halloween in Nebraska, not all the results will have that exact phrase. Instead, Google will treat those words as separate and show the results accordingly. However, if you do "halloween in Nebraska", only those results will show up that have the exact phrase. 

 

2. -query - Use this to exclude something from the results. For example, if I were to search for Microsoft -Google, that means I need results that talk about Microsoft without any reference to Google. 

 

3. intitle: - This can be used when you need to locate text in the title of an article. So doing a search for intitle:Windows 8 Start Screen will show the articles that have this phrase in their title.

 

4. site: - You may use this one when you want to restrict your search to a specific site. If you do site:techsspots.blogspot.in, it will only show posts from our blog. If you were to do gmail site:techsspots.blogspot.in, it will show the posts about Gmail on techsspots.

 

5. filetype: - This is for locating files. For instance, filetype:pdf will return results that contain PDF files. 

 

Tip: All the above operators can also be used in conjunction with each other. For example, you could do "Gmail" -Firefox to find posts about Gmail that exclude references to Firefox.