Top 5 advanced Google search tips

We filed a list of advanced Google search tips so you can get more effective search results. Mostly the techniques involve manipulating the search string but at the end we will show you an easy way if you cant remember the syntax of the special strings.

1. Use double quotes for exact phrase searches. Usually, Google is smart enough to determine the matching websites that contain your queries but there are cases that it returns “relevant” pages at the top that don’t exactly match your search string.

To limit Google to return only pages that has the exact string as your query, enclose your query with double quotes. Be careful though, since you are querying exact strings you might miss relevant pages that are really related with your search. Searching “Michael Hall” for example could cause you to miss relevant pages containing “Michael C. Hall”.

2. Limit search to a single domain. You can limit your search to a single web domain by appending “site:domain name” to the search phrase. For example, to limit a search to pages belonging only to wikipedia.org, I appended site:wikipedia.org to the search query.

3. Use wildcards for unknown terms. This is good if you don’t know exactly what to put in the search query. For example, if you want to query pages containing Michael * Hall (the * is the wildcard), the popular page that has “michael” + any word + “hall” on them will come up.

You will get pages containing “Michael C. Hall” and also “Michael Jordan’s Hall of fame…” since the wildcard assumes any thing between the words “michael” and “hall” to be any word.

4. Use the OR operator to allow either one of several words. For example if you want to look for pages containing “Michael C. Hall” or “Dexter TV Series” just search for “Michael C. Hall OR Dexter TV series”.

5. Use the advanced search page: http://www.google.com/advanced_search The advanced search page will let you search for contents on the web with filters on language, date of creation, format, usage rights, geographical region and numeric range.

Also, check out Google’s new Search Options feature that came out only a few weeks ago. It lets you quickly filter by date and brings up related searches.

Most of the time we find pages on the web using only Google’s default search page. However there are times that we need more filtering capabilities. For those advanced Google searches, make sure to apply the tips above to get better search results.