Using Google Search More Effectively

Google is the king of the web search sites out there. It is also used by millions of people to find what they need on the Internet. However, despite its wide use, Google is still not used to its full potential by most people. Many use it only to do basic search, while Google is capable of much more.

Search Operators

The main feature of Google is standard search: you type the term you are interested in, click the search button, and Google returns the search results that best match your query. This is the way that millions of people perform search on this web site.

However, few people know that Google can return you much more information. You just need to ask for it. An to ask for more information with Google, you can use search operators, which will make your life much easier.

Examples of Search Operators

There are several search operators that you can use with Google. The one that I find to be most useful is the "site:" operator. You can use the keyword "site:", followed by the name of a web domain, to find information contained specifically in that web site.

Suppose for example that you want to find a list of jobs available at Google. You can do that easily by using the term your are searching (jobs), together with the "site:" keyword, and the domain google.com. Your query will then look something like this:

jobs site:google.com

You can use the same strategy in any web sites. For example, if you want to see how many times I mentioned for example "googlepack" in this website, you can look for

googlepack site:all-about-google.blogspot.com

Which will return several pages.

List of operators

This is an incomplete list of operators, with the ones that I find most useful

allintitle: this operator allows one to find the web sites with the words you are looking for in the title. It helps to focus you search even more, since these are supposed to be specialized websites.

link: this operator, when followed by a web site address, will return all the pages that link to that site. It is good if you are trying to find who links to your page, for example.

allinurl: this is similar to allintitle, but it will find the pages where the keyword you are looking for appears in the URL, that is, the complete address of the site you are looking for.

define: this one can be used to find specifically a definition for the keyword you want to search. This will usually return information from dictionaries, and other reference material available on the web.