17 Google Search Techniques You Need To Master

Here are some techniques you can use when searching the web with Google. You can specify one or more sites to search, or exclude sites, terms and more. You can add date ranges, use boolean operators and even a special advanced search page.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at some Goggle search techniques. 
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So no matter what you do on your Mac you probably perform web searches at some point or another throughout the day. You can simply type the terms that you want to search for and see what results you get. But there are a variety of special things that you can put in a Goggle search that will help you find what you want faster. I'm want to start off with the one I use the most which is to perform a site specific search. You do this by using the word site followed by a colon with no space after it and then immediately type the domain name of the website. So, for instance, if I want to search for iMovie I might just type iMovie. But if I wanted to search MacMost for iMovie tutorials I would simply type iMovie followed by site:and then MacMost.com. Notice that all my results, every single one of them, is going to be at MacMost.com. Now you don't need to include the entire domain. If you want to search for just the top level domain like say .edu you could do that instead. Then you could get results in any website that ends with .edu.
After that the next most common thing I use is Minus to eliminate some results. For instance I could type iMovie and then if I look at the results I'm going to get various things here including some pages that have reviews in them. If I want to not have any review show up I could subtract review and you won't find any results that use that term. Likewise you could use Plus to make sure something is included. So if you just wanted to see iMovie reviews you could use plus instead and you could see all the results are going to include review either in the title or the body. 
Another thing you could do is use Quotes. Quotes will do two things. First they will actually make sure that exact term is used in the result. Not a synonym for it and not maybe left off if there are other search terms in there as well. The other thing they will do is combine words to make sure they appear exactly in that order together. So if I were to do, say, knitting tutorial, the results are going to have exactly knitting tutorial. Not some other word for tutorial or knitting and not those two words in different parts. So you could see here most of the titles have it in there and in some cases it would be used in the body as well. 
Now you can use some of these together. For instance you could use Minus and Site together to eliminate websites. So if I were to search for iMovie here you could see I get results that are Apple.com. If I want to remove Apple.com from the results I could do -site.apple.com. My results will include everything else but not apple.com. Now you could see the first result here is Wikipedia. I could add another minus site to that and let's say I do .com. That's actually not going to work because Wikipedia is .org. But I could just do an asterisk instead and you could see now it knows to remove .org, .com, .whatever. 
Another modifier you can use is intitle. If you use intitle: and then you put a search term. Then you're only going to get results to have that search term in the actual title. Not just the body of the text. You can combine these. So let's do a second term. Now I'm only going to get pages that have both knitting and tutorial in the title of the page. 
There's a companion one to this, intext. If you do intext instead of intitle it's looking in the body of the page. You can also do inurl. So if I do iMovie and then inurl and say forum then the url, the actual webpage address, has to have the word forum in it. So you could see here it's included in all of the url's here. So let's say I wanted to search MacMost for iMovie and I only wanted to see what was in the forum, not in the tutorials. So I could do site.macmost.com then inurl:forum. You could see every single one of the results matches that. I could put a minus in front of inurl to eliminate all of the forum responses and just see every other page at MacMost that contains iMovie. 
Now using Wildcards in Goggle searches is kind of tricky. They don't work the same way they do in programming languages and database searches. But you can use them for some things. For instance if you type something like, how to and then an asterisk on a mac, you're going to get results that tend to follow the how to and then some text here on a mac. You'll see a lot of these are similar and it will start to diverge later down in the results. 
Now a big one that really hasn't been with us for that long is the ability to search before a date or after a date. So let's say I want to search for knitting tutorials but I want to find recent ones. I can do after and then colon and then a date. But the date has to be in a special format. It's basically year and then dash and then month dash and day. A lot of people like to put zeros in front of those to make it look like a proper Julian date. Now I'm only going to get results that are synced to June 1st of this year. I can leave off the day if I want it to be before the first of that month. You could do the same thing with before. So if you wanted to find really old results you could do something like that. You could also use both before and after in the same search results to find something in a very specific range. 
Now you can use Boolean Operators OR and AND but you have to use them in capital letters else it's going to think they are a regular word you're searching for. So, for instance, let's say I wanted to search for an xbox and I want it to look just on Amazon. I could do that. But I could also do OR and then site:bestbuy. Now all of my results are going to be either Best Buy or Amazon results. You could always use parentheses as well. Parentheses will group something together like that to make sure Goggle understands exactly what you want. Here's another example. Do intitle and then how to and then I'll put in parentheses knit OR crochet a blanket. 
A more obscure search operator is Around. So you could do something like knitting and then AROUND, it has to be in all caps, and then tutorial. What this will say is knitting and tutorial need to be within two words of each other. Of course that's looking everywhere. In titles and the body. So let's do intitle and now you could see knitting and tutorials either together or in some cases it's separated but within two.
Another useful tip that I use all the time is not to worry about spelling. Goggle will figure out what you're trying to spell. Just spell it as best you can and usually Goggle can figure it out. So if I'm looking for information about this star and I can't remember the right way to spell it I just do that and you could see it's going to say Show Results for and give me the right spelling. I didn't have to waste time to actually look up the proper spelling first. I can always click there and change the actual search if I want to. 
Here's another one. There's a special search operator called Related and what this does is you give it a website and it will show websites that Goggle things are related to it. So, for instance, if you want to look up encyclopedia information and you can't think of where else besides Wikipedia you can go, you can do Related and do Wikipedia.org and you're going to get results that show you other sites that may have information similar to Wikipedia. 
Now beyond what you can type there are a ton of tools that you can access after you do the search. So, of course, at the top you can narrow down by type. I can look at just Videos or just Shopping Items or just News. There's more here and you can go and say Finance or just Images. You also can click Tools and then depending upon the results you'll find different things here. The most useful is Any time. So instead of using Before and After you could actually go here and do things like Past Week or Past Month which are really useful especially as a programmer and you're looking at different versions of programming languages, I want results that are in the last year most of the time. So I'll do the search and then go and modify with Past Year. 
Finally if you really want to do a powerful search, instead of just going to Goggle, go to Goggle.com/advanced_search. Then you get this page. This page allows you to do a lot of the things I just showed you but without having to remember what to type. So you can fill all of this stuff out and do a very specific search even things I haven't talked about. Like by region or language or numbers ranging from one thing to the other. For instance, prices or weights or years. Things like that. You can even search by file type. All sorts of things. So Advanced Search is really the place to go if you want to dig down and find information online. Don't just start with the regular Goggle page. Go here. 
So there are a whole bunch of tips but by no means everything Goggle can do. If there's a favorite search technique that you use that I haven't covered mention it in the comments below.  Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “17 Google Search Techniques You Need To Master”

wei chong

3 weeks ago

Superbly useful, clear and encompassing.

Jerry Morris

When performing an image search the choices are, Any size, Large, Medium, Icon. Is there a way to designate a size greater than X? Google removed this option some time back.

Gary Rosenzweig

Jerry: Use the Advanced Image Search I show at the end of this tutorial and you can.

Lindy

Gary! You have just increased the world’s productivity exponentially … thanks for your awesome site! 👍❤️

Gazza DownUnder

2 weeks ago

These tips also work in the search engine DuckDuckGo (on macOS and iPhone and iPad) etc.
Switch to DuckDuckGo in the Safari Preferences, Search options on each device.

Andrew Hatheway

5 days ago

Any chance you have a cheat sheet with all of these techniques? Would be beneficial to have it handy until they become routine for me.

Andrew: You can maybe take the transcript above and copy and paste it to a document, edit it to your liking to create your own cheat sheet.

17 Google Search Techniques You Need To Master

Comments: 7 Responses to “17 Google Search Techniques You Need To Master”

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