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Advanced Google Search Queries

Google is undoubtably the world’s most well known and widely used search engine. However I doubt that a large proportion of Google users really understand the power of Google search and the various ways it can be used to track down very specific information and resources.

Here is my breakdown of the most useful advanced search operators to be used in Google:

Phrases:

Instead of just searching for keywords, it is often much more useful to group keywords into phrases. This is very easy to do, simply wrap your chosen phrase in “speech marks”. By doing so you will only pull pages which display the entire keyphrase as it is, instead of pages which display all of the keywords, but not necessarily as a phrase.

See the results of these two searches:

edmonds commerce Bulk Catalogue Handling or edmonds commerce “Bulk Catalogue Handling”

Site:

You can limit your search to pages within a certain web site. This can be great for finding things, but as a web master it is also useful for seeing how many of your pages are being spidered and indexed by Google.

e.g. site:www.edmondscommerce.co.uk shows all of the pages that are indexed by google under the edmonds commerce domain name.

InURL:

The inurl: operator searches for the term in the URL of the site. This is good for finding specific sections of a web site. So for example I can see how many of the Edmonds Commerce Blog pages are indexed by mixing up the site: operator and also using the inurl: operator to only pull pages that have the blog/ sub folder in the URL.

e.g. site:www.edmondscommerce.co.uk inurl:blog
InTitle:

Like the inurl: operator, the intitle: operator looks for the keyword in a specific place, this in in the <title> tag of the page. The title tag is what is usually displayed as the link text in Google search results pages.

So another way of finding all of my indexed blog posts is to search for the word Blog in the title

eg. site:www.edmondscommerce.co.uk intitle:blog

The Minus Operator:

A very powerful operator, the – minus sign allows us to show results that do not match the following. So if we want to find pages from the Edmonds Commerce domain that do not have the words “web design” on the page, we can do the following search:

e.g. site:www.edmondscommerce.co.uk -”web design”

Conclusion

Google is a great search engine and it is definitely worth playing around with your searches to get the best results. Also, as a web master you should really be doing everything you can to figure out how the big G works so that you can ensure you are doing everything in your power to get your site to the top of the results.

Related Blogs:
Hybrid SEM: The ultimate guide to advanced searching

Putrefy: Google Advance Search

Seo Smarty: Advanced Search Commands

More Reading:

 

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