Advanced Google Search

Most people know that Google supports Boolean search such as the common AND, OR & NOT statements in order to link adjectives to nouns, join subjects of interest, or to exclude common results which do not apply to your search.

There are a number of other advanced operators, however, that can be very useful for mining the web for specific types of information, web pages or files.

One simple example is a "fuzzy" search. By preceding a word with the ~ symbol, you can tell Google that you are interested in that word, all synonyms of that word, and terms that are intimately related to that word. For example, the fuzzy search "~school" will simultaneously display results for school, institute, college, academy and similar terms.

Searches of greater depth and specificity can be conducted using in-line search modifiers to augment how and where Google attempts to find matching text. For example, using the modifier "-intitle" will display results that have elements of your search string in the title of the webpage (the blue bar at the top of your browser window).

For example, if you're hoping to find a phone number then you might want to look at pages which contain the word "Directory" in the title.

Other in-line modifiers include:

-allintitle
Displays only pages which contain all of your search terms in the title.

-inurl
Searches the text of the web address.

-allinurl
Similar to -inurl, except like -allintitle this search will only return results that include all of the terms.

filetype:
Looks for specific file types, for example filetype:pdf

link:
Displays webpages that contain links to the given page, such as link:www.hudson.com

site:
Searches within a given website (often better than the site's built in search function!)

Mixing and matching some of these variables with your search terms creates search strings which can be powerful ways to pull very specific information that's floating around the web. For example, let's say I'm looking for a candidate in my area (Greater Boston) that has experience with programming in Java?

I bet there are people with their resumes posted on their personal homepages, and Google has probably indexed them. Let's combine several functions to create a search to find them.

(intitle:resume OR intitle:"my resume" OR intitle:documents OR intitle:portfolio OR intitle:profile)
Shows us web pages with likely titles that would contain someone's resume.

("978" OR "617" OR "781")
Common telephone area codes in the Boston area.

("java" OR "ejb" OR "j2ee") and ("developer" OR "engineer" OR "architect")
Names of the skills we're trying to find.

(-writing OR -sample)
Excludes results that are likely resume writing tips sites, or have resume samples only.

Putting them all together:

(intitle:resume OR intitle:"my resume" OR intitle:documents OR intitle:portfolio OR intitle:profile) ("978" OR "617" OR "781") ("java" OR "ejb" OR "j2ee") ("developer" OR "engineer" OR "architect") (-writing -sample -samples)