Google-Fu

By Isaac

As a technical person, as funny as it might sound, there is one skill that is as essential as any other to know if you're to be as successful as possible, and that is being able to google well (or DuckDuckGo well, or... bing well? lol).

One's immediate instinct may be something like "Google well? I can type what I want into a search engine and an answer will usually come up that answers it", and that may be true, but odds are the search term is either inefficient or, more likely, what you want is too specific to reasonably be found in a single search term...

Or so you may think.

There are in fact many different ways you can manipulate a search term to get more precise results, using Google's in-built operator functions. this list will go through a few of them.

Note: Many, but not all of these tips will apply to other browsers (most popularly amongst Hackers, DuckDuckGo), for further information, consult the Docs

Standard Advanced Search Operators

Google has an "Advanced Search" functionality, where a user can input more precised, advanced search terms into a form, and the corresponding search string is spat out and the user is redirected to that search, this section will cover these operators.

  • Standard Search: search a link for any instance of any word in the search field, what one would typically imagine a google search to be, for example, frog and toad would return all results with the words "frog" "and" and "toad" in, with the most relevant towards the top

  • Exact phrase: use " operator to find an exact phrase in a google search, e.g "frog and toad" would return results with the literal string "frog and toad"

  • Any of these words: use the | or OR operators to return a result including either term x or term y, e.g frog | toad or frog OR toad

  • None of these words: use the - operator directly before a term to exclude that term from results, e.g. frog -toad will return results containing the word "frog" but explicitly not "toad"

  • Number range: use .. between two numerical values to find search results with numbers in that range, e.g. "born in" 1981..1996 would find results for people who are in the generally accepted range "Milennial"

Dorking

this cheat sheet found here, with thanks to the author, sundowndev

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