Learn Howto Use Advanced Search Operators And Take Full Advantage of Google

First up, google search. Before you move to the next section, you may learn a few things so stay with me. Google allows you to use “special operators” that can narrow down or make search results more accurate.

Google has a habit of excluding common words (where, are, and, or, 1, I, etc..). But what if one or more of these excluded words is necessary to obtain the desired results? Simple! Add a + in front of the word(s) being excluded. For example…

pepsi +and coke or… +how +and why

You can also wrap your search terms in quotation marks…

“pepsi and coke” or… “how and why”

You may seek results for two different terms, but google removes “or” from your searches. To overcome this, simply replace “or” with “OR” - too easy! pepsi OR coke, windows OR linux

The same way you use the + operator to include words, you can also use - to exclude certain words. For this example, we’re going to search for ringtones. It’s safe to assume nothing is free. Most free ringtone providers only provide 5 or 10 free ringtones, but receiving those 5 or 10 free ringtones allows the ringtone provider to subscribe or make you a member of their service. Next time you see bogus charges on your phone bill, think back real hard, “did I give my phone number to a ringtone provider?” If not, ask your kids. Unfortunetly, kids are targeted because 9 out of 10 won’t read the fine print.. So lets find some ringtones!

Simply searching for ringtones returns 123 million results! Lets weed out some of the scams and get some more specific results (*enter -*). Adding in -free to our search string, the results are reduced to 92 million. Those 92 million results contain ringtones for every phone, plan, and provider imaginable. 92 million results will provide little to no use, so lets insert another operator to narrow down our results yet again. This time we’ll provide a service provider like nextel.

ringtones -free +nextel

Total results are now at 1.2 million. You could even go a step further and add specific artists, like metallica

ringtones -free +nextel +metallica

which returns less than 1,000 results.

Google also provides operators that allow users to search archived pages, find pages containing links to a site, define words, find search terms within a specific site, find search terms within a title, or even a URL. To see what a site looked like prior to google’s most recent index, use the cache: operator.

cache:www.ebay.com

If you’re interested in sites that link back to a particular site, use the link: operator.

link:www.google.com

Google also has a built in dictionary that’s just as easy to use. Can you guess how? You got it! define:

define:google

Some sites have ridiculous amounts of information, but no search option, or they have a search option, but the format of the results is unreadable. Google will allow you to search indexed pages - we’ll use ebay for this example.

pepsi site:ebay.com

That query will bring back ebay pages with the term “pepsi.” You can go a step further and add +rare or +antique to find collectables. In addition to the site: operator, you can also supply inurl: or intitle: - these operators will obviously return results containing your search terms within a URL or within a site’s title, respectively.

Over the past eight years, google has yet to let surfers down. GMail (still in beta) smashed competitors with an enourmous 2 gigabytes of storage, and continues to grow (at the time of this article, gmail offers 2777.596493 megabytes). The image search will display thumbnails (clickable to full size) matching your search terms. Video search will even let your search videos! People submit humorous commercials, segments of television shows, cool scenes from movies, movie trailers, special news broadcasts, you name it! Don’t have time to surf all your favorite news sites? Check out google news. And for those of you who enjoy the ease of RSS feeds, google has a fantastic RSS Reader.

The shopping, calendar, maps, aahh! The features are endless, and they’ll just continue to grow until google integrates everything into an entire operating system! (I’ve read google will eventually provide bootable operating systems - w00t! They’ve denied plans to start an ISP, so why else purchase so much darkfiber & IPv6 subnets?) I will let you in on a secret that most people don’t even take the time to notice. To find out what’s going on with google, check out “More Google Products” and “Google Labs.”

Despite the simplicity and lack of aesthetics, this young company will continue to make competitors ph33r the leetness.