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You have been using Google wrong your entire
life, or at least not taking full advantage of
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it. Many of you already know about the special
search commands, or "operators" they're called,
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like for searching within a specific website, or
for a certain file type, but turns out that there
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are some legitimately hidden search operators that
even I didn't know about until making this video.
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For example, this "AROUND" operator, which
is not officially documented anywhere,
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that searches for content where the left and
right terms are found within a certain number
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of words from each other. I'll explain
more of the details of that one later,
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but you get the idea, there's a
lot of cool ones. Now, like I said,
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there doesn't seem to be any official list
or support article with all the operators,
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though there are scattered support pages and
official blog posts that mention some of them.
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However, there is this list, which
was created by a senior research
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scientist at Google named Dan Russell
during his time working there. So,
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this is probably the closest to an official
list we can get. I'll put a link to it in
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the description and you can also get to it
with this short link, bit.ly/AllTheOperators.
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Before we get to those, I want to quickly make
sure you at least know about the user interface
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options in Google, which you can access by
clicking the "Tools" button. The time range
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option is self-explanatory, but incredibly useful,
as well as the "Advanced Search" link, which takes
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you to this page. Some of the filters here can
only be used from the "Advanced Search" page,
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like searching by language or usage
rights, so it's good to know about.
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Then there's this "All Results" drop-down, which
lets you change the results to "Verbatim" mode,
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which is really important to
know. To understand this one,
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you have to realize that Google will usually
manipulate your searches using synonyms of words,
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and might not count certain words it
doesn't consider important to the query.
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And you can tell this because it will usually
bold the words in the results that it considers
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a match to your search. But if I search something
like this very specific model for DDR5 RAM, you
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can see only the first result returns pages for
that exact model SKU. In the rest of the results,
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they are not that model that I searched for,
or are totally different products altogether.
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And you can see here, it even bolded a totally
different non-matching, but similar model
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number. But if I'm searching for something
that specific, I want it to match exactly.
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But when I switch it to "Verbatim" mode, all the
results do include that exact model number. So,
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basically it just makes sure to
match terms exactly without synonyms.
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Now, I've found the "Verbatim" mode may
occasionally include other results in
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the case of typos specifically. Like
this admittedly stupid example, says,
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"bigchungus" and "yoloswag" with
no spaces within each, and it says,
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"did you mean" this with spaces, and the results
do show it as if it added the spaces. So,
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to force it to be absolutely literal for each
word, you have to put quotes around each of them.
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So, the quotes are not only good for
searching exact phrases with multiple
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words, but also to force it to search a
specific spelling. And also, fun fact,
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it turns out you can actually use quotes around
a word within a longer quoted string. So say you
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search for, quote, "a mispelled word," and
"mispelled" is actually misspelled there,
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it changes the query and shows results for
the true correct spelling, not what you put.
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And while you could click the
"search instead for" button,
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which will use your exact string, you can
also put quotes around the inner word,
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"mispelled," and it will get you the same exact
results using what you literally put. And also,
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another thing about quotes, if you want to
ensure that Google includes results only
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that have all of the search terms, you can put
those in quotes, even if it's a single word,
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and then it will always include all the
things that have quotes around them.
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Now, before we continue to more search
operators, something you shouldn't have
00:03:58
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features. And with all that being said, let's
continue on to more of the search operators.
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Two more of the basic operators before we get
to the more advanced ones are the asterisk and
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minus sign. You might already be familiar with
these. The asterisk simply acts like a wildcard,
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but what I didn't know is apparently it
will replace only up to five words or terms,
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where a term is a word or combo of
words that are not separated by a space.
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So, a hyphenated set of words would count as one.
Otherwise, it behaves just like you'd expect. The
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minus sign ensures that results do not include
the term that you put the minus sign before,
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and make sure there's no space before it.
This can be used to exclude individual words,
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entire quoted phrases, and can even be
used as an inverse for other operators.
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Like this would exclude results from the
domain google.com. Alright so now onto
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some of the more advanced ones you might
not know about or not much about. First
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is the "OR" operator. This has to be typed as
all caps and goes between two search terms,
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either words or quoted phrases, but you can
chain them together with multiple "OR" operators.
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And this is subtly different than how
the default search works. By default,
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Google will prefer results that have all the terms
in it and prefers the same word order that you
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searched. So, if I searched "physics memes," it
returns results for memes about physics. But if
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I do "physics OR memes," it has results that are
simply about physics or memes, not physics memes.
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Although, it does apparently include that
too. So, I don't think there's a way to
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do mutually exclusive, you would have to
just use two separate searches for that.
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You can use the "OR" operator within phrases
too. Like, you can do "physics OR chemistry
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memes," and it will return results for memes
that are about either physics or chemistry.
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Next, let's talk about that "AROUND" operator
that I mentioned at the beginning. This must
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be written in all caps followed
by a space and then a number,
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and it goes between terms, sort of
like the "OR" operator. With this,
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Google will return results where the left and
right terms are found within a distance of
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however many words you put as that number, and
the word order of the terms does not matter.
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So maybe you want to find pages where a specific
person was talking about a certain subject,
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like John Carmack talking about ARM processors.
You could do, "John Carmack" "AROUND 20" "ARM
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processor," where it's going to look for those
two phrases within about 20 words of each other,
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which might get better results than
if you were to just search the terms
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by themselves and those terms exist
anywhere on the same page in general.
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And actually, it seems to be a decent result.
It seems to me that the number that you put
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specifically means the max number of
terms between your specified terms. So,
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"AROUND 0" would apparently mean that
the words are right next to each other,
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but again, order doesn't matter. As a side
note about this one, I've seen websites show
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this operator being used with parentheses,
which also will work, but is not actually
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necessary since Google completely ignores
parentheses, so either way apparently works.
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Next up, here's an interesting one, which is how
to do number ranges. You type two numbers and
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then put two periods between them, no spaces.
So, say for some reason I needed to search for
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several iPhone versions at once, like iPhone 20
through iPhone 25. I could simply search this,
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and I'll be sure to put quotes around it
all, so it searches it as full phrases.
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And through the magic of already trying
this, I know that you'll also need to
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enable "Verbatim" mode for good results. And
as you can see, the results are indeed pages
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mentioning the iPhone 20 all the way up
to the iPhone 25, just like we hoped. Oh,
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and it turns out you can also use the
number ranges operator for dollar amounts.
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So, this will return results mentioning
the phrase, "a X price tag", where "X"
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is in the range of $1,000 to $5,000. You can
sort of do the same thing with percentages,
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but I found that you have to do it like this
with the regular number range and then a space
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before the percentage sign. Next, there are a
bunch of ways to specify exactly where you want
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to search on web pages using these operators:
"intext", "intitle", "inurl", and "inanchor".
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And there are "all in" versions of each of
those too, which I'll mention later. With these,
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you put the operator and a colon
and then the word or quoted phrase
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with no spaces between them. "intitle"
searches only the title of the page,
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which is what appears in the browser
bar, but not necessarily the page itself.
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"intext" is the opposite, it's what you would
see in the actual text part of the page. So,
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this is pretty close to what normally gets
searched anyway. "inurl" can be really useful.
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It makes that particular term only match
if it's in the URL itself, regardless of
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the rest of the page, which I actually find more
useful to use as a negative to exclude things.
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For example, when I was searching
Google support articles, I searched
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for "site:support.google.com", but didn't
want to include the Google help forums,
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just the articles. So, I used a minus sign and
the "inurl" operator to exclude any results
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that have "thread" in the URL, which all the
forum URLs do, and that got what I wanted.
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For the "inanchor" operator, I wasn't
familiar with anchors myself, but apparently,
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that's for websites that have specific parts of
the page that you can link to, like subheadings
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on a Wikipedia article, for example, where you
can copy a direct link, this heading thing is
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called anchor. And then it would only search
for text in part of those major headings.
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If you happen to know that what you're looking
for would be in one of those. For the "all in"
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versions of all of these, apparently, you would
put these in the beginning of the search box,
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and then this would basically be like the
same as putting the individual version in
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front of each term separately, but
otherwise, they do the same thing.
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Now, I've mentioned the "site" operator a lot,
but there are some nuances for it. You can just
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do normal domains and subdomains like we saw, but
you can also just put a top-level domain extension
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like "gov" and it will only return .gov domains,
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for example. You can also use asterisk wildcards
for entire subdomain components between periods.
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And you can use the minus sign to exclude certain
subdomains while using another second "site"
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operator for the rest of the main domain. Moving
on, there's the very useful "filetype" operator,
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which can really come in handy if you're
searching for a document or just a certain
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type of file in general. You just put the file
extension of the file and it will only include
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results for those files, presumably
in either the contents or the title,
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assuming it's a file type that
can be indexed and uses text.
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You can also use the "ext" operator, short for
extension, which is apparently the exact same
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thing. A couple of caveats here are that this
operator will not work for most sound files,
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like MP3, and also it seems other [audio]
files like wave, M4A, and those don't work,
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apparently for copyright reasons. And
also, it won't show results for CSV files.
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I assume probably because so much
raw data is stored in spreadsheets,
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it would clutter up the index.
But Google does have a page for
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searching data sets you can use for that
instead. So, now that you know all this,
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I officially declare you a master of Google-Fu.
You can put it on your resume and everything.
00:12:48
And you now have legal permission
to leave a comment saying,
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"I'm an elite Google-Fu master who
watched till the end of the video,"
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to make all the low-attention-span people
jealous. Thanks again to Bitdefender for
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sponsoring. Be sure to check out their new
scam protection platform called Scam Copilot.
00:13:02
You can learn more through the link in the
description. Now, if you want to keep watching,
00:13:05
next up, I'd recommend a video where I talked
about a bunch of new scams to watch out for,
00:13:10
and I'll put that link right here if
you want to click on that. Be sure
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to give this video a big thumbs up if
you enjoyed it and thanks for watching.
00:13:15
I'll see you in the next one.
