Adding Advanced Operators

< Google Manual

We’ve been through the basic operators that tell Google what to search for. Now we look at the advanced operators that instruct Google where in the pages or site, or even in which site, it should look to execute the query. These are essential in fine-tuning your search query.

You’ll identify these operators easily because they are a word ending with a colon. Here is a list of the operators:

• site:
• inurl:
• allinurl:
• intitle:
• allintitle:
• intext:
• allintext:

Do not include a space between the operator and the word following it. Sometimes a space will work, but no space always works.

Note that all the operators that start with “all” cannot be mixed with other operators in a query, and cannot be preceded with a “-” sign.

Specify Site to Include (or exclude) with site:

The site: operator tells Google to search only within a particular site, or within sites with a certain Top Level Domain (domain suffix).

Let’s say you want to see only pages about Gmail help only in the Google site:

[gmail help site:google.com]

Maybe you’d like to see what tips (actually synonyms of tips) that sites besides Google have:

[gmail ~tips -site:google.com]

How about educational sites that discuss political correctness:

["political correctness" site:.edu]

Multiple sites require multiple site:’s–one per operator.

Specify Word in URL to Include (or exclude) with inurl:

With this operator you can restrict the results to pages that contain a word in the URL. The word can be anywhere in the URL, not just in the domain name. The following finds pages that contain “UCLA” in the URL, “prerequisites” anywhere on the page, but are not from UCLA’s own site:

[inurl:ucla prerequisites -site:ucla.edu]

Putting inurl: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allinurl: at the front of your query.

Specify Multiple Words in URL with allinurl:

Allinurl: works similarly to inurl: except that it can be followed by multiple words. The search will be restricted to pages that contain all of the query words in the url. For example, the following query will return pages that have either “UCLA” and “Bruins” or “UCLA” and “Football” in the URL:

[allinurl: ucla bruins | football]

Specify Word in Site Title with intitle:

Web sites insert a title in each of their pages. This is what you see in the title bar of your browser. These titles are chosen carefully so that the search engines will index their site in the way which best represents its contents. So, being able to search only the title is a very, very powerful search. The operator intitle: performs this search.

Let’s say you are looking for pages that have “Anaconda” in the title, do not have “movie” in the title (Anaconda was the name of a movie) and have the word “danger” anywhere in the page:

[danger intitle:anaconda -intitle:movie]

Specify Multiple Words in Site Title to Include with allintitle:

Operator allintitle: is to intitle: as allinurl is to inurl. It will do what intitle: does, but all the words that follow it must be in the title. For example, the following search query will find all pages that have the words “fish”, “taco” and “recipe” in the title. This will give us a better chance at finding pages that actually have the recipes in them, rather than pages that merely mention them.

[allintitle: fish taco recipe]

Specify Word in Site Text with intext:

This operator looks for pages that have the word in just the text only, and not anywhere else in the page (URL, title, META keywords). I don’t really see much use for it; you might as well do a regular search. Here’s the format:

[intext:stupid]

Specify Multiple Words in Site Text with allintext:

I’ll bet you guessed what this does. It does what intext: does, but with multiple keywords. Here’s the format:

[allintext:really stupid]

< Previous: Adding Basic Operators | Next: Searching within a Number Range >