Conquering Google Search

When I was chatting with a friend of mine in fb, she asked me if I knew of any sites which provided weird facts/news. Being a great fan of Google (I seriously believe Google can solve ALL your problems), I asked her to google it. She then said that the search results were not good enough...

That is when my googling skills came into the picture. With one search string, I solved her problem (precisely the third result in the first page did!) That is exactly when I thought why not share with everyone the little things I know about Google search engine(its available everywhere,including google advanced search; its just that people don't look)!

Here are a few search parameters I use during my searches:

String in double quotes- Google searches for the EXACT string in double quotes

A "-" before a word in search string- Such words are excluded from the search. Eg. Searching 'shevchenko -chelsea' will give all results with shevchenko but not containing the word chelsea.

"site:" - For searching a particular website. Eg. 'IMG site:iitr.ernet.in' will search for the string "IMG" in the website iitr.ernet.in

"inurl:"- As the name suggests this parameter gives results where are a part of the url.

"intitle:"- Returns results where words in the search string are part of the title of the page.




"link:"- link:URL shows pages that point to that url. You can't combine it with other expressions.

"location:"- Shows results from a particular location.

"intext:"- Results contain words which are part of the text of the document.

"filetype:"- Searches for files with the given extension. Eg. filetype:doc searches for Microsoft Word documents (.doc)




However the best way to search for documents is using a combination of these parameters...




Happy Googling, folks! Hope Google makes your life easier (just as it has made mine!).

P S- There is no space between the search parameter and search string. Eg 'site: iitr.ernet.in' and 'site:iitr.ernet.in' are different, the later being correct.