Key Syntaxes for Advance Google Search

Everyone with access to internet knows how to search the web for a particular piece of information and the first step he takes is to go to google. Following are the ten key syntaxes for Advance Google Search, which help you in finding the exact information you need.

Filetype

Query Example: “AJAX Tutorial filetype:doc”

The above query will produce you the results which are in document format (word documents). It restricts the search result to the particular extension (in this case extension .doc). Simply enter the text query in google search bar followed by ’space’ and ‘filetype:’ and after that the extension name.  (There is no space in between ‘filetype:’ and extension name ‘doc’)

Some examples: Word Documents – doc, Excel Documents -xls, Powerpoint -ppt, Zip documents – zip, rar, tar, gz, Adobe PDFs – pdf,

Cache

Many times i have found search results, which leads to no where, or the page has expired. In that case this tag is very useful. It gives you the page which google has cached at the time of indexing. So you will see the copy of the page, which existed at that point of time, irrespective of the changes made after that.

Query Example: “cache:http://indiafm.com”  This will give you the cached version of IndiaFm.com, Similarly the following query will give the cached pages with words Amitabh “cache:http://indiafm.com amitabh” (there is space between http://indiafm.com and amitabh).

Link

If you want to search for all pages/websites which link to a particular URL/Website, you can use this syntax.

Query Example: “link:http://santosh.wordpress.com” This will result in all the pages which link to http://santosh.wordpress.com. But you have to put exact url in title. So if a page links to www.santosh.wordpress.com it will not be thrown out by the above syntax.

Intitle

Use this key syntax to search for a particular word/term in the title of the documents.

Query Example: “intitle:zimbra” This will give all the webpages and documents whose title contains the word ‘Zimbra”.

Inurl

This syntax will give you all the pages which have the specific search term in the url.

Query Example: “inurl:results” The query will give listing of all pages which have url like http://iifm.ac.in/results.html .

Site

You can restrict your search for a particular word/topic to a website only by using this syntax.

Query Example: “site:youthink.worldbank.org corruption” This will give all the pages of Youthink site with word “corruption”. 

 While using this syntax if you put “site:www.nic.in” it will restrict the search to www.nic.in but following query will search all the websites with ’in’ domain. “site:in mahatma gandhi” it will search all the websites with ‘in’ domain for words ‘mahtma’ and ‘gandhi’ 

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