Google has taken into account the needs of its users and has engrafted in its search engine a lot of commands that help users to get best possible results.
There is no doubt behind the fact that Google is the most efficient search engine in the world, but as the saying goes,” nothing is perfect”, and so Google is no different. There are times when we search for something and get no relevant results. At such times we just feel that Google is no good. But again the innocence lies on our part. We have been so used to find results easily, that we just want to type in a few keywords and expect that the best results pop up automatically. This kind of searching might be one of the quickest ways to search but surely does not return the most precise results.
Google, being Google, has taken into account the needs of its users and has engrafted in its search engine a lot of commands that help users to get the best possible results. These commands are actually very useful and help to save a lot on search time. Some of these commands and their usage are shown below:
In all these commands syntax note that there is no space between the command and the keyword. Then there is a space and then the search terms. In case the keywords contain a space or there is more than one keyword, then you can put the keywords inside double quotes(“keyword keyword2”).
This command will restrict your search results to pages whose title contains the keyword provided. For example <intitle: “techpluto” mobiles> will search for the keyword mobile only in the web pages whose title contains the word “techpluto”.
Intext: { syntax: intext:keyword search terms}
This keyword will restrict your search to those pages whose text contains the keywords provided. Google will search for the keyword only in the text, that is, excluding the links and the title. For example <intext:”Motorola” mobiles > will search for mobiles in the pages whose text contains the word Motorola.
Inurl: { syntax: inurl:keywords search terms}
This command will search for the search terms only in the pages whose URL contains the keywords. For example < inurl :techpluto mobiles> will search for term mobile in the webpages whose URL contains “techpluto”.
Site: { syntax: site:www.main_url_ of_website.com search terms}
This command will search for the search terms only in the pages of the website whose URL is provided. For example <site:www.techpluto.com mobile> will search for the term ‘mobile’ in pages having URL of the format www.techpluto.com/<anything>
Phrase Search: { syntax: “Search Terms”}(with the quotes)
Phrase search tells Google to search for the search terms as it is. When you normally type in a phrase in a Google search, then Google picks up all the words separately and shows relevant results depending whether all or some of those words appear on a page in any order whatsoever. But by using phrase search Google search will only show web pages that contain the exact phrase provided by you in the quotes. For Example searching for <“technology site”> will search for the whole “technology site” keyword. One noticeable fact is that the website containing “technology website” will not be shown in the search as Google will search for the whole phrase “technology site” as it is.
Filetype Search: {syntax: filetype:extension search terms}
This lets you find a file of a specific type on the internet. For example if you have to search for a PowerPoint presentation on pollution caused by the industries you can search for <filetype:ppt pollution caused by industries>. This will return only the file with the extension .ppt which the extension of the Microsoft Power Point Presentations.
Related Pages: {syntax: related:URL }
This command will tell Google to search for pages which are related or are pretty much similar to the page you provided in the URL, For example if you search for <related:wikipedia.org> it will return search results with websites which provides features or information pretty much similar to the one provided by Wikipedia.
Ignore (specific) words or Include (common) words:{syntax: search terms “included_keyword” -excluded_keyword}
This method helps a lot when you are searching for something which is strongly connected to some other thing, which is not required by us. For example if we search Google for <physics> it will return pages which have the term physics but of those pages might also have information about mechanics which is an essential part of physics. Now supoose we wanted to search for physics excluding the mechanics part, then we can use this method and search for <physics -mechanics>
To specially include a common word such as “a” or “the” we simply put the words in quotation marks. for example if you have to search for a movie named “The Fox” and you simply search for <the fox> then Google might ignore the keyword the and search only for the word fox because ‘the’ is a very common word and might be found on a lot of websites. Thus to get accurate results you can search for <“the” fox>. This time Google will specially include the word “the” in its search.
There a few more commands available on Google which make your searching experience a lot better. To get hold of these commands and other important features you can head on to this official Inside Search website: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/