Thursday, November 30, 2006

Google hacking: maximize the effectiveness of your queries

Here's a bunch of cool stuff you can use to squeeze the most out of your Google experience (a lot of it gleaned from Google Hacks):

General queries:
  • "x y z" phrase: match the whole string as one
  • x (y OR z) boolean: match x and either y or z (same as x (y|z))
  • x -y negation: match x but not y
  • +the fuzz explicit inclusion: to prevent auto-ignore of common words (or put in quotes)
  • ~x synonyms: match x or words like x
  • x 1..100 number range: match x and any number between 1 and 100 (can also leave out one of the numbers to do a floor or ceiling)
  • for ** bell tolls full-word wildcards: match for, any 2 words, then bell and tolls
  • intitle:x search titles of web pages (use allintitle: to include all following words)
  • intext:html search only body text
  • inahchor:x search links' descriptive text
  • site:x search a certain website (does not understand subdirectories)
  • inurl:x search within urls
  • link:x return a list of pages that link to a certain page
  • cache:x return the cached copy of a page
  • filtype:x search for certain filename extensions (htm and html return different results)
  • related:x find pages related to x
  • info:x show information that Google has gathered about a page
  • phonebook:x search Google's phonebook for a certain number
  • define:x gives definitions for a word according to the web
  • movie:x search for a movie
  • music:x search for music
News:
  • source:x search for news from a specific source
  • intext:x search within text
  • intitle:x search within titles
Groups:
  • insubject:x searches posting subjects for query words
  • group:x search within a certain group
  • author:x search for posts by the author
Blogger:
  • blogurl:x searches a specific blog by its URL
  • inblogtitle:x search blogs titles
  • inposttitle:x search post titles
  • inpostauthor:x search by post author
Other things to remember/cool stuff:

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