Google Search Operators Worth Remembering

Google Search operators are useful when a normal query returns too much noise. I do not remember all of them, but a few—especially quotes, -, site:, and filetype:—save a surprising amount of time.

Google changes search features occasionally, so some of the specialised operators in this 2021 reference may no longer behave exactly as they once did.

Narrow the results

"tallest football player" searches for an exact phrase.
jaguar speed -car excludes pages containing car.
marathon OR race accepts either term. OR must be uppercase.
camera $150..$1000 searches within a numeric price range.
camera $700 adds a price to the query.
@twitter searches for a social profile, while #blackfriday searches for a hashtag.

Search a particular part of a page

site:google.com limits results to one site; site:.gov limits them to a domain suffix.
intitle:"tesla vs bmw" looks for the phrase in page titles.
allintitle:apple iphone requires every following term in the title.
apple announcements inurl:2019 looks for 2019 in the URL.
allinurl:apple iphone cases requires every following term in the URL.
intext:"iphone vs samsung vs LG" looks for the phrase in page text.
allintext:iphone samsung LG requires every following term in page text.
"apple announcements" filetype:pdf limits results to PDF files.

You can combine several of these. For example, site:example.com filetype:pdf "annual report" is much more useful than scrolling through an entire site and hoping its search works.

Special result types

These queries were also available when this post was written:

related:time.com looked for similar sites.
cache:example.com opened Google’s cached copy of a page.
weather:riga showed weather for Riga.
stocks:aapl showed stock information for Apple.
map:riga showed map results for Riga.
movie:titanic showed information about the film.

The exact phrase and exclusion operators are the ones I would learn first. Add site: and filetype: and most everyday searches become much easier to control.