Advanced Google Searches

One of the more common questions that I get asked is how do you find what you are looking for on Google?

Google can be great but as the results are based on an algorithm that uses (amongst other things) popularity there are times when the results you get are not what you are looking for, especially if the search terms are shared by a currently popular TV series or other trending topic.

For a long time there have been ways to use certain terms in your search that will help eliminate the noise. These include the following (non-exhaustive) examples:

• if you simply enter the terms you will get the most popular items, so little red corvette will get you lots about the Prince song
• If you want to get an exact match you can put the terms in “” to ensure all the words are present, e.g. “little red corvette car” will bring you examples of red corvette cars
• you can omit words by using a minus sign so for example if you wanted a little corvette that wasn’t red ; little -red corvette will bring you a completely different set of results

These in themselves are pretty useful but there are more:

• you can limit the search to a specific website or set of sites by using the site: command.  So for example if you knew that the information you wanted was likely to be on say the BBC you could use the terms you want to search along with site:bbc.co.uk.  Even more powerfully, if you wanted to find something about sites of a certain type you can use a wider net, for example if you wanted to search UK academic sites you could use site:ac.uk
• one of the trickiest things to find first time are specific documents but again there is a command that can help – if you use for example filetype:doc it will return Microsoft Word documents.  Not every filetype is supported but most of the common ones such as the Office suite, PDF, Text files and OpenOffice formats are all included

While having some of those commands in your head can be helpful, Google of course also has a much easier way to go about more advanced searches although it isn’t something that I’ve seen discussed much elsewhere.

If you head on over to https://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search you will be presented with a simple search page that allows you to pick and choose from a range of options:

As you can see, this contains all of the examples I gave earlier along with some others that could help further trim down the answers you get.