10 Simple Google Operators For Geeks, But Hustlers

Updated: Aug 2021: Now how to search for best performing stocks!

Knowing google search and understanding advance operators can change the way you work. I have been using the basic operators such as quotes, asterisk, add, subtract and others for a million things.

You can also combine multiple operators for deeper analysis and search.

The basic and most useful operators:

1. * [the asterisk]

How often you forget how a song went, or the last term of your favourite phrase. Searching for a phrase, an idiom, song lyrics, campaign names, or anything that can turn into fill-in-the blanks is easy. Use the asterisk to complete the search query. Remember Google will try to complete the phrase irrespective of the number of words following it.

Run of the *

will get you the idiom ‘run of the mill’ in results or any such phrase that starts with Run of the. Notice how the manual query has dragged the default dictionary snippet entry to the bottom.

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2. “” [the quotes/string search]

Searches the exact phrase or word that’s inside the quote.

If you look at the search below we have used "+" to add two exact match phrases. Google can't find the exact phrase in the search results and asks us if we want to search without the quotes. Exact match will only get results if the content has query - exactly as it is.

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3. AND/OR operator

Now look at the search query below. We have removed "+" and used "AND" operator instead. The "AND" operator won't join the phrases like "+" does. The "AND" operator will search for both the exact match phrases and return results if both are found, while the "+" operator joins the two phrases, turning the search query to be "Youth problems during lockdown pandemic". Notice how Google still asks us if we want to search without the quotes. Always use caps to use operators like AND, OR, etc.

Now if we change the operator to be "OR", notice how the results include no such suggestion as above. This is because the result may now contain any of two phrases. It’s like showing searches for each word on one page. "Pandemic" is obviously a broad keyword, while it'd still be difficult to find results for long exact match queries like "Youth problems during lockdown."

6. – (minus)

The subtract operator works like the addition operator. Caution: There’s no space between the operator and the text. Even though the addition operator may work with space, the subtract operator won't work if there's a space between the operator and the query.

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7. Find specific formats

You can just use exact match with the quotes.

But now that you know how to combine operators. You'd be able to do this:

And this:

Use the operators as per your use case.

Now as per official Google developers page the other operators include:

8. site:url / cache:url / related:url

Search within a specific url. Find cached pages with "cache:" operator and related pages with "related:" operator

Use "src:url" to find pages that reference a particular image URL.

9.

Use "imagesize:dimension" to find images of specific dimensions like below:

imagesize:1200x800        

10. exchange:share

How to run stock queries and find apt results?

Use more advance queries like this.

Don't forget to combine queries with simple operators we talked about earlier.

Let me know if you want to know more.

What Google search tricks do you use? The article will be updated with your use-cases and feedback.