Google Search Terms

Contents

• Simple search expressions
• Special search expressions

Simple search expressions

In Google search queries, the entered words are automatically linked with a logical "AND". This means that Google searches for all entered words. Google is case-insensitive. Therefore, the following two search queries are identical:

House AND STEEL AND Concrete
house steel concrete

To search for one of the entered search terms, the logical operator "OR" is used. Alternatively, the pipe symbol (|) can be used instead of "OR". The search query

house OR concrete OR steel

finds pages containing either the word house, concrete, or steel.

Search queries can contain multiple different operators. Furthermore, terms can also be grouped using parentheses. To search for the word "house", as well as "concrete" or "steel", you can use the search query

house (concrete | steel)

or

house (concrete OR steel)

.

Google treats each entered word individually, and it doesn't matter in what order the entered search terms appear in the document. If you want to search for a very specific phrase, you must enclose it in quotation marks. The search query

"unix time stamp"

finds documents that contain exactly this sequence of words.

A search often returns many pages that have nothing to do with the search topic. To instruct Google not to find pages containing a specific word, you must place a minus sign in front of the word. The following search query finds pages that contain "unix time stamp" but do not contain the word "system":

"unix time stamp" -system

If you want to search for a specific word combination but don't know one or more words within the search term, you can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard. The search term

"everything * finest"

finds, for example, "Everything from the finest", but also "Here everything was just right, NATURE HOLIDAY at its finest!".

If you want to search for one or more special characters or punctuation between letters, you can use a period as a wildcard:

vicky.21

finds, among other things, "Vicky (21)", "Vicky, 21", or "Vicky :: 21".

Note: Google removes common words such as "is", "the", or "for" from the search query because these words appear on many pages. If you still want to search for these words, you must place a plus sign in front of them.

Special search expressions

Google also allows you to search specific parts of a web page. This could be the title, the actual text, or a link. To do this, you must specify certain keywords before the search term, separated from the search term by a colon. There must be no spaces between the keyword or colon and the search term, unless they are enclosed in quotation marks.

intitle:

Searches only the titles of web pages. However, only the term immediately following "intitle" is considered. The search term

intitle:"unix time" stamp

searches for "unix time" in the page title and "stamp" anywhere on the page.

allintitle:

Searches for all specified words only in the title of a web page. The search

allintitle:"unix time" stamp

Finds the phrase "unix time" and "stamp" if they appear in a page's title. "allintitle" should not be used with other special expressions.

inurl:

Searches only the page URLs for the specified term. It works similarly to "intitle".

allinurl:

Searches only the URLs for the following words. It works the same as "allintitle". "allinurl" should also not be used with other special expressions.

intext:

Searches only the page content for the specified term. Links, the URL and the title of the page are not searched.

allintext:

Searches only the page content for the following terms. "allintext" should not be used with other special expressions.

inanchor:

With this expression only the link descriptions in the pages can be searched. If the HTML source code of a link is

<a href="https://www.gaijin.at/">Gaijin's Homepage</a>

only the text "Gaijin's Homepage" will be searched.

site:

The phrase "site:" will search only for the specified host, domain, or top-level domain. Here are some examples of this search phrase:

site:www.gaijin.at
site:gaijin.at
site:at

link:

Displays all pages that link to the specified page.

link:www.gaijin.at

Finds all pages that contain a link to https://www.gaijin.at/. However, the "https://" prefix can be omitted. However, searching with "link:" is not very accurate.

cache:

Search for a page in Google's cache. The query

cache:www.gaijin.at

returns the most recently saved version of the page. This search term can be particularly useful if the page has recently been completely changed or removed.

daterange:

Limits the search to a specific time period in which the page was indexed. Since Google expects a Julian date, this function is rather cumbersome.

filetype:

With this search term, it is possible to search only for specific file types. The desired file name extension is specified after "filetype:". For example,

filetype:doc

only searches for Word documents. The search term

"google hacks" filetype:pdf

only searches for PDF documents containing "google hacks".

related:

The search term "related" searches for pages that are related to the specified page. For example, searching for

related:gaijin.at

provides pages related to gaijin.at.