Using Search Operators
You can use most of the options we discussed in Google’s Advanced Search Formin a regular search box query. If you’re a frequent searcher or a “power searcher,” this can save time because you don’t need to open the Advanced Search page and fill in various boxes; instead, you can enter the refined query in almost any Google search box. You’ll use advanced operators, query words that have special meaning to Google. Since the advanced operators are convenient for searching, Google Guide calls them search operators.
Note: We recommend that you skip ahead to the Part Understanding Results unless you’re an experienced Google user or you want to know how to use Google’s advanced operators.
1. Examples
Here are three places you can find examples of search operators.
- Visit the Google Guide Advanced Operator Quick Reference and look for special operators of the form
operator:value
. - Fill in Google’s Advanced Search form. Then look at the search box on the results page; you may see that Google has added search operators to your query. For instance, if you fill in the Advanced Search page, asking Google to “find results with all of the words” [ detect plagiarism ] and to “return results where my terms occur: in the title of the page” your results page should look like the one shown here. Notice the
allintitle:
search operator that Google added before your query:...............................ecc,ecc,ecc