Targeted searching using Google operators
Prefixing your search terms in Google with any of the recognised operators is a great way to streamline your searching. The more information you have about your target, the more specific you can make your query.
One operator I have previously covered is ‘define:’, which will attempt to find a definition for the term that follows it, such as define:search. Other operators work in exactly the same way, but instead of defining a term, they can be used to further specify your search criteria.
Say you wanted to find all the pages on The Age website about kittens. Using the operator ’site:’, we can limit the search results to only those pages from theage.com.au. This is done by simply adding the operator and the site to the search criteria, giving us the search term: kitten site:theage.com.au
If you know any of the terms in the page’s title or URL, then you can use this to locate the page using the ‘inurl:’ and ‘intitle:’ operators. Building on our earlier search, we can restrict our list of The Age pages about kittens to only those pages with ‘cat’ in the title with the search term: kitten site:theage.com.au intitle:cat
If you already have a site’s address, there are also operators that will let you find out more information about that site. In this case, just enter the operator followed by the URL. These include ‘info:’, which will display information about the page and links to other operator searches on the page; ‘related:’, which shows a list of sites that Google believes are like the one specified; and ‘link:’, which shows which pages link to the specified URL.
However, perhaps one of the most useful operators is ‘cache:’. This will bring up a copy of the page that Google stored last time it indexed the site. This is extremely useful if a page suddenly becomes unavailable or is changed and you need to see a recent previous copy. As with all these operators, there should be no spaces between the operator, the colon and the term.
These operators allow for some really specific searches to be run and, if you know what you are looking for, can slash the amount of time spent wading through pages of results. It is worth experimenting with each one to see what kind of results you get and to become familiar with each so you can work them into your daily searching.
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Tags: cache, define, Google, info, intitle, inurl, operators, site
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