Search
Tips:
The Basic Search
To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press
the Enter key or click the Search button for
a list of relevant results.
Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find
pages that are both important and relevant to your search.
For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page,
but also the pages linking into it to determine the value
of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers
pages in which your query terms are near each other.
Note: Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted
to HTML for indexing; however, the HTML is not displayed.
Spelling
A single spelling suggestion is returned with
the results for queries where the spell checker has detected
a possible spelling mistake.
The spell checker feature is context sensitive. For
example, if the query submitted is "gail divers," "gail
devers" is suggested as an alternative query. However, "scuba
divers" would not return an alternate query suggestion.
Note: Currently, the spell checker supports
only US English.
Synonyms
Synonyms are other words that have the same
or similar meanings. They are displayed as "Other suggested
searches" on the results page.
Sorting
by Date
The Sort by Date feature sorts and
presents your search results based on date. The date
of each file is returned in the results. Results that
do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted
by relevance.
Automatic "and" Queries
By default, Google only returns pages that
include all of your search terms. There is no need to
include "and" between terms. For example, to search for
engineering product specification documents, enter:
To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.
"OR" Searches
Google supports the logical "OR" operator.
To retrieve pages that include either word A or word
B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example,
to search for an office in either London or Paris, enter:
See
Your Search Terms in the Results
Every Google search result lists one or more
excerpts from the web page to display how your search
terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt,
your search terms are displayed in bold text so that
you can quickly determine if that result is from a page
you want to visit.
Does
Capitalization Matter?
Google searches are not case sensitive.
All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood
as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington," "George
Washington," and "George washington" all return the same
results.
Does
Google Observe Stop Words?
Google ignores common words and characters
known as stop words. These include most pronouns and
articles. Google automatically disregards such terms
as "where" and "how," as well as certain single digits
and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow
a search and can significantly slow searching. If you
want to use stop words in your search, use the "+" sign
or enclose your phrase containing stop words in quotation
marks. Make sure that you include a space before the "+" sign.
For example, to search for Annual Report Version I:
You can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.
Does Google Use Stemming?
To provide the most accurate results, Google
does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches.
Rather, Google searches for exactly the words that you
enter into the search box.
For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not
yield "airline" or "airlines." If in doubt, try both forms, for example:
"airline" and "airlines."
Refining Your Search
Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of
the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search
is as simple as adding more words to the search terms
you have already entered. The refined query returns a
specific subset of the pages that were returned by your
original broad query.
Excluding
Words
You can exclude a word from your search by
putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the
term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space
before the minus sign.
For example, the search:
will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."
Phrase Searches
You can search for phrases by adding quotation
marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this")
appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches
using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous
sayings or specific names.
Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work
like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double
quotes join your search words. For example, the search:
is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not
enclosed in double quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods,
equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.
Restricted Searches
You may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain ways.
Restrict Type
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Query Syntax
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Example
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to a given location on your site |
allinurl; allintitle; inurl; intitle |
allinurl:google help
see Advanced Operators for details |
to specific domains |
site: |
site:google.com
see Advanced Operators for details |
to specific file types like excel spreadsheets,
pdf docs, etc. |
filetype: |
filetype:pdf |
Directory Restricting
To restrict the directories searched, enter a URL that
drills down through the directory structure to the directories
or files to be searched. For example, the query [google.com/manual/] restricts
the search to everything at the manual level. If the
trailing slash is not included, as in [google.com/manual],
then all subdirectories are also searched.
Advanced Operators
Google Search supports several advanced operators,
which are query words with special functions. A list of the
advanced operators with explanation are provided below.
cache:
The search engine keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available
in a backed-up format known as "cache." A cached version of a web page
can be retrieved if the original page is unavailable (for example, the
page's server is down). The cached page appears exactly as it looked
when the crawler last crawled it and includes a message (at the top of
the page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.
The query [cache:] shows the cached version of the web page.
For instance, [cache:www.google.com] shows the cached page of Google's homepage.
Note: There can be no space between cache: and
the web page URL in the query.
If you include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted within the
cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com press releases] shows
the cached content with the words "press" and "releases" highlighted.
info:
The query [info:] returns all information available for that particular
URL. For instance, [info:www.google.com] shows information about
the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the info: and
the web page URL.
site:
If you include [site:] in your query, the results are restricted
to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] finds
pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] finds
pages about help within .com URLs.
Note: There can be no space between the "site:" and
the domain.
link:
The query [link:] enables you to restrict your search to all pages
that link to the query page. To do this, use the [link:sampledomain.com] syntax
in the search box.
For example, to find all links to Stanford's main
page, enter:
allintitle:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], the results are restricted
to documents with all of the query words in the document's HTML title.
For example, [allintitle: google search] only returns documents
that have both "google" and "search" in the HTML title.
intitle:
If you include [intitle:] in your query, the search is restricted
to results with documents containing that word in the HTML title. For example, [intitle:google
search] returns documents that mention the word "google" in their
HTML title, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document either
in the title or anywhere else in the document.
Note: There can be no space between the "intitle:" and
the following word.
Putting [intitle:] in front of every word
in your query is equivalent to putting [allintitle:] at
the front of your query. For example, [intitle:google
intitle:search] is the same as [allintitle:
google search].
allinurl:
If you start a query with [allinurl:], the search is restricted
to results with all of the query words in the URL. For example, [allinurl:
google search] returns only documents that have both "google" and "search" in
the URL.
Note: [allinurl:] works on words,
not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation.
Thus, [allinurl: foo/bar] restricts the results
to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in the URL,
but doesn't require that they be separated by a slash
within that URL, that they be adjacent, or that they
be in that particular word order. There is currently
no way to enforce these constraints.
inurl:
If you include [inurl:] in your query, the results are restricted
to documents containing that word in the URL. For example, [inurl:google
search] returns documents that mention the word "google" in their
URL and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document either in the
URL or anywhere else in the document.
Note: There can be no space between the "inurl:" and
the following word.
Note: [inurl:] works on words, not
URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation.
Thus, in the query [google inurl:foo/bar],
the inurl: operator affects only the word "foo," which
is the single word following the inurl: operator,
and does not affect the word "bar." The query [google
inurl:foo inurl:bar] can be used to require both "foo" and "bar" to
be in the URL.
Putting [inurl:] in front of every word
in your query is equivalent to putting [allinurl:] at
the front of your query. For example, [inurl:google
inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl: google
search].
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