Mastering Google Search

Google can do a lot more than find a word or two. Perhaps basic for experienced Googlers, the following search tips are worth mentioning anyway.

Got a tip or trick of your own for searching Google? Click EasyEdit to add it to the page below.

Quote search

Reduce your search results by either enclosing your search term in quotes or placing a dash between the keywords. Searching for “George Bush” or George-Bush will keep Google from returning irrelevant results like a link to the George Brothers Lawn Service website.

Date search

From the Advanced Search page, Google allows you to restrict your search by date. Unless you are searching Google Groups or Google News, the date search seems imperfect.

File type search

You can restrict your search to any file type you’d like by using the command “filetype” followed by a colon. So, if you are looking for primary documents from the International Olympic Committee, you might try this search: filetype:pdf IOC. Choose your search terms carefully when searching for PDFs, as Google doesn’t index the whole document. The spiders stop scanning at 120 KB, so make sure your search term will hit near the top.

Wildcard search

Use the asterisk (*) if you want to search around a variable. For instance, searching for “National * Agency” will give you results for the National Security Agency, the National Mapping Agency, the National Accrediting Agency, etc. But the wildcard doesn’t work within a word, you can’t search for ama*jad to find the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Happily, Google spellchecks for you.

Link search

Google lets you see what sites are linking to another site by prefacing your search with the command “link” followed by a colon. Who likes the Drudge Report? Searching for “link:www.drudgereport.com” will show you the 66,000 sites that link to it.

Site-restricted search

By using the command “site” followed by a colon, Google lets you search within a domain for the information you need. So, if a site doesn’t have a built-in search feature (usually powered by Google using the exact same search technology), you can apply a search to the site yourself. Find out what AT&T has to say about national security issues by searching for: site:att.com "national security.”

Google Weather

Just type “weather:city” into Google to get your local forecast.

Phone directory

Type in someone’s name, town and state, and Google will retrieve phone and address listings for that person. Plug in a phone number with an area code, and Google will work as a reverse-lookup engine, displaying to whom the number belongs.

Domain-restricted search

Like a site search, you can limited your search results by type of domain. Want to find what colleges are saying about steroid use on their own sites? Search for: site:.edu steroids. Some sites help you with this type of search. Google UncleSam will search only .gov sites for your query. FindLaw’s LawCrawler does the same for legal-related searches.

Cached links

When Google’s computers scour the internet searching and identifying pages, they save a copy of the pages and display them under the search result as a “cached” link. So you found the perfect page to answer your question, but the site is down? Click the cached link. Or say your Congressman had something embarrassing on his Web site, but took it down when it hit the blogs: he can’t take it out of Google’s cache! If Google’s cache missed it, try archive.org’s Way Back Machine—but for this to work, the site you’re looking for needs to be at least six months old.


See also:

• Froogle
• Fun With Google
• Gmail
• Google Book Search
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups

• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Zeitgeist
• Image Search
• Your Website and Google