| General |
Google is the most popular search engine with highly relevant results. Google ranks the search
results primary by site popularity (=number of links to it from other pages). This can be
especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as
"cars" and "travel," because users across the web have in essence voted
for good sites by linking to them. News links, when they are found, are
returned at the top of the page.
Google is the only search engine that search full text in most common file-types on the
net and has a complete Usenet archive dating back to 1981.
If you search has non-English results, there will be a link to a automatically translated
page in English.
Database refresh: Google.com uses a special adaptive crawler that can respond quickly to
breaking news, making it available on Google in as little as 15 minutes after a story has
been posted.
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| Case Sensitive |
No. |
| Phrase searching |
Enclose the phrase in quotation marks " ", e.g. "like this
phrase".
Notes: Google search also for the stop words in quoted phrases. Google
recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs and apostrophes as phrase
connectors. These phrase connectors work like quotes.
|
| To require |
Use + immediately before a word but it is extraneous, because all terms are
always "ANDed".
Note: Google ignores common words and characters (known as "stop words"). To
retrieve pages containing Stop Words (along with other words), precede the stop words
immediately with + (e.g. effects +on gravity
) or use quoted phrases.
|
| To exclude |
Use - immediately before a term or phrase, e.g. cats -dogs. |
| Boolean logic |
AND: default, assumed between words.
OR: use an uppercase OR between words, e.g. vacation london OR paris
to search for a vacation in London or Paris. Note: OR functions only between single
words, not between phrases in " ".
No parenthesis () or nesting.
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| Stemming |
No. You must perform a separate search with each variant, including plurals.
|
| Wildcards |
No. |
| Sub-searching
|
Yes. At bottom of results page, enter new terms and click "Search within results".
|
| Field searching |
cache:URL
will show the version of the page that Google has in its cache, e.g. cache:www.google.com.
Note: If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document.
link:URL
shows you all the pages that point to that URL, e.g. link:www.google.com. Note: You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search.
related:URL
will list web pages that are "similar" to a specified web page, e.g. related:www.google.com
info:URL
present some information that Google has about that web page, e.g. info:www.google.com
spell:query
If you begin a query with these operator, Google will spell-check your query instead of performing it. If it notices potential misspellings, it will offer alternate queries for you to try.
stocks:TickerSymbols
e.g. stock: intc yhoo
will show information about Intel and Yahoo. Note: type the ticker symbols, not the company name.
filetype:extension
limits your search to files with the specified extension, e.g. power crisis filetype:pdf gives pdf files that contain the words "power crisis". Available file types are: Adobe PostScript (ps), Adobe Acrobat (pdf), Lotus 123 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku), Lotus WordPro (lwp), MacWrite (mw), MS-Excel (xls), MS-PowerPoint (ppt), MS-Word (doc), MS-Works (wks, wps, wdb), MS-Write (wri), Rich Text Format (rtf), Text (ans, txt).
site:URL
restrict your search to a specific site, e.g. admission site:www.stanford.edu finds admission information on Stanford's site.
allintitle: search query
restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title, e.g. allintitle: google search will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the title.
intitle: search word
restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title, e.g. intitle: google search will return documents that mention the word "google" in their title, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (title or no).
Note: Putting intitle: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allintitle: at the front of your query.
allinurl: search query
restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the URL, e.g. allinurl: google search will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the URL. Note that allinurl: works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation, e.g. allinurl: foo/bar will restrict the results to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in the URL, but won't require that they be separated by a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent, or that they be in that particular word order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints.
inurl: search word
search for documents containing that word in the URL, e.g. inurl:google search will return documents that mention the word "google" in their URL, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (URL or no). Note that inurl: works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation, e.g. google inurl:foo/bar here the "inurl:" operator will affect only the word "foo", which is the single word following the inurl: operator, and will not affect the word bar.
Note: Putting "inurl:" in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting "allinurl:" at the front of your query.
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