Understanding Google Advanced Search

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Understanding Google Advanced Search

By Simon Goudie ⋅ January 14, 2008 ⋅ Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Google’s Advanced Search screen can look a bit daunting at first, but offers some very powerful options to help you make the most of your search. I’ll go through the page from top to bottom, so you may like to open a new window and follow along.

Find results

These four boxes are a breakdown of the regular operators that you can use in a Google search: and, or, plus, minus and quotes. I covered these in an earlier post that you might like to review here.

The first box (with all of the words) contains all the words you wish to search for and is the equivalent of the search box on the main Google page.
The second box (with the exact phrase) lets you search for a certain phrase, such as “to be or not to be”, as a phrase rather than individual words. This is the same as if you had enclosed the phrase in quotation marks in a regular search.
The third box (with at least one of the words) works the same as putting a plus sign in front of a search term and ensures that only results that include that term are returned.
The last box in this section (without the words) is the opposite of the previous box and ensures that none of the results includes a certain term, which is the same as prefixing a regular search term with a minus sign. This is useful when searching for a term that can be easily confused, for example Prince -music.

Language

Specifies what language you would prefer the results returned to be in. Google can also attempt to automatically translate pages in other languages if these are returned in your search results. The translation may not be perfect, but it is often enough to be able to find the information you may need.

Region

This selection will limit your results according to the country of the site, which is identified by the two-letter identifier after the .com or .co in the sites address. Examples include .uk for the United Kingdom, .ca for Canada or .au for Australia. You can find a complete list here. However, not all sites have addresses that include their country, with many opting to use the general .com format. The .com format also seems to be the default for US sites, with .us domains being quite rare.

File Format

If you are looking for a file, rather than a webpage, you can specify that here. The most common use for this field is probably PDF files, but you can also specify Microsoft Office documents or other types. This is the equivalent of using the filetype: operator and can also be set to exclude certain filetypes from the results.

Date

Your search results can be limited to those pages published within a certain timeframe with this field. You can limit the results from the past year, right up to the past 24 hours. This means that you can keep track of the latest developments in a topic, or look for more historical information.

Numeric Range

This is a very versatile field that enables you to enter a range to include in your search. This may be useful, for example, if you are searching for a car and would like to specify a range of years between 1996 and 2000. This also works for other ranges, such as prices, times or distances, so you can refine your search in different ways. Specifying a range, such as 1996 to 2000, in these fields is the same as entering the range with two points between the values in a regular search, 1996..2000 in this case.

Occurrences

This field searches for your terms in certain parts of the document, namely the title, text or URL. It can also search for the given text in the links pointing to the page. This field is useful if you have a page in mind that you are trying to find and know some information about it, but can remember its location. These features can be emulated in a regular search by using the allintitle:, allintext:, allinurl: and allinanchor: operators, respectively.

Domain

Restrict your search to a specific site by specifying it in this field. In most cases you would enter the top level of the site, such as nytimes.com. This will only return results based on your keywords from the nytimes.com website. This is the same as using the site: operator in a regular search.

Usage Rights

This is an interesting field that allows you to filter your results based on the their copyright license. If you are searching for content that you are allowed to reuse or modify, this is perfect. It is based on Creative Commons licensing and, while users are encouraged to double-check the license to ensure they are acting correctly, is a great function for people looking for material to repurpose, stock materials or other free-to-use resources.

Safe Search

Adult material, such as pornography and other explicit content, can be filtered from your search results using this field. This setting is also available under the Preferences link from the main Google page, as are some of the language settings.

Similar

The last two options require you to enter a web address (URL). Specifying a web page’s URL in the ‘Similar’ section will return a list of suggested sites that Google believes are similar to the page. This is based on a variety of criteria and is the same as using the related: operator and entering the page’s address.

Links

Entering a web page’s URL into this field will return a list of other sites that link to that page. This is useful to gauge a page’s popularity, to track a discussion or find similar sites. Again, this functionality can be used directly from a regular Google search by using the operator link: and then entering the page’s URL.

Next…

And that’s everything. There are a few links at the end of the page that will take you to some content-specific versions of Google, such as Google Book Search and Google Scholar, but for day-to-day searching, you should be able to use the above fields to wade through the internet to get close to the information you are looking for. Once you are used to using the Advanced Search screen, you can then start to use the operators in your normal Google searches.

The most important advice when it comes to advanced searches is to experiment! Try different things and see how the search results vary. There’s a lot of information out there, all it needs is for you to be able to track it down.