12 ms·
Google Search Operators: A Complete List (2018)
- pighive 8y agoThis is cool!
- hackersword 8y agoI've found it the case if you do more then one "advanced" searches using these operators, your flagged as "unusual activity" and have to do captcha to prove you not a bot.
- zzzcpan 8y agoYeah, this is some cloudflare-level "security" abused to the point where we enter this strange paradoxical state. Advanced features exist, but are not allowed to be used enough by anyone to actually learn them and use often.
- fuhrysteve 8y agoHonestly I bet it's a learning algorithm that they used to identify bots, rather than something a human decided. Spam detection algorithms usually have a training set. One of the features could have been "uses_feature_x", which, according to the training set, is known to have a high probability of being a spam bot (because humans rarely use those features)
- zozbot123 8y agoThis is why we need more variety in search engines. Google does not want you doing "advanced" and "unusual" things with their service anymore, because they're scared that SEOs will use this to manipulate their search outcomes. But of course every SEO targets Google anyway, so the "plain vanilla" results are just as terrible!
- shittyadmin 8y agoThe main reason they block this is because it's used by malware as in infection vector - makes it easy to find vulnerable hosts running outdated webapps for example.
- zozbot123 8y agoThe fact that they're restricting this feature across the board suggests that they're more scared about SEO efforts. Malware-related searches would be easier to spot as an anomaly and filter out (and the article states that they do this in some cases).
- shittyadmin 8y agoThey don't restrict it across the board, I use many of these operators all the time without issue, the only time I run into difficulties is doing very specific "Google dork"-like queries repetitively.
- zozbot123 8y agoThat's exactly the SEO use case though. I mean, it's not exactly a secret that grey/black-hat SEOs want to do this, the problem is that the limits Google places on it inconvenience every power user too!
- shittyadmin 8y agoI must be missing something here - How would this impact SEO? Blackhat SEO is primarily about generating false backlinks to your site, often through blog and comment spam. Search queries to Google will have little if any impact, especially using fancier operators.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoPart of me thinks it's not their responsibility to do this. It's pretty paternalistic behavior. It seems typical of Google these days, though. I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products.
- jjoonathan 8y agoI got "hellbanned" the other day -- google kept giving me captchas but always marked my answers incorrect. 20 minutes later, I gave up and drove to the library (!). It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they have slowly obtained over my life.
- yesco 8y agoWhy not just use a different search engine? Was the library that much easier in this case?
- jjoonathan 8y agoGoogle search wasn't the product being gatekept by google's captcha.
- DKWf8EV 8y agoI don't think you really got hellbanned, Google captchas have just become extremely buggy in recent months. Whenever I have to solve one it always takes me a few tries, sometimes a dozen or more, and I usually triple check whether I've actually selected all the traffic lights/bicycles/chimneys/whatevers before submitting... (Alternative hypothesis: If you solve a captcha correctly, they intentionally give you a few more, to get more good data for their AI algos.)
- nkurz 8y agoIt's ironic that this comment saying about "hellbanning" was "autodead", and I had to "vouch" to revive it.
- kbenson 8y agoI wonder if it hit some automatic filter by virtue of being new, and talking about banning/hellbanning?
- warent 8y agoI'm inclined to go with your alternative hypothesis. The quality of the captcha response degrades the more times you solve it consecutively. I was recently developing a web frontend that had a captcha implementation on the login form. The first couple times I solved the captcha there was no problem. Then once it got to fourth and fifth one it started making me solve a few of captcha pages in a row. Eventually it was forcing me to solve several pages of "Select the picture of the fire hydrant" over and over, often marking it as incorrect when it definitely wasn't, and then restarting back from the beginning so each run-through took multiple minutes forcing you to solve dozens of captcha pages before accepting it as correct. So, to add to your hypothesis, they're probably doing this intentionally not only to get more data for their AI algos, but also to mitigate people training bots on CAPTCHAs. EDIT: Also the fact that you're being downvoted is baffling to me but my tinfoil hat persona makes me wonder if it's some orchestrated downvote because you're pointing out a hypothesis that Google is trying to keep hidden.
- blhack 8y agoCurrently running into this problem. I've gotten really frustrated trying to read the news lately, where washingtonpost especially will say that I've used up all my free articles for the month, and can't read anymore. Okay, that's fine, but then I'd rather not see them in my google results. If wapo wants to put their content behind a paywall, cool, but google should be an index of things I can read. So I've been experimenting with various search flags to exclude them. Started getting hit with captchas just now.
- reaperducer 8y agoIf you're on a Macintosh or iDevice, Apple News lets you block specific sources. I use this to lock out sources that are behind a paywall, or that only feed Apple News one paragraph and require you to click/scroll through to their site for the full story. Often nothing is lost because those sites are only barely functional on mobile anyway.
- mario0b1 8y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ does not have this problem. (And it has really good search results too)
- wasim_ullah 8y agoThey are not as flexible and powerful.
- MichaelMoser123 8y agoYou can search on duckduckgo with the g! operator. This makes the search anonymous (does it?) That's why duckduckgo is my default search engine.
- mateo1 8y agoI've encountered the same issue. On top of that, you're no longer allowed to search for specific strings with the '"' operator. It just ignores it. What a world we live in. I can dictate an email to my phone or search videos based on the semantic interpretation of their automated audio transcriptions (yes I've noticed Youtube will sometimes do this) but I can't search for some unpopular technical term because I'm obviously a bot if I do this. Thanks for correcting me Google, of course I meant to search about "laser hair removal", not "laser air breakdown".
- jraph 8y agoI tried !ddg and !duck but it does not quite work. This Google search engine feels a bit strange and lacking. I hope they will catch up in this competitive market some day. I want to like it because it has a few nice features and I've tried it a few times but I always return to my good old regular search engine.
- trulyrandom 8y agoWhich DuckDuckGo features, other than bangs, do you miss in Google Search?
- agmater 8y agoNice try, Google!
- reaperducer 8y agoCan I count not tracking and monetizing me as a feature?
- eitland 8y agoBetter instant results fron Stack Overflow. Less stupid A/B tests (sometimes I'd get idiotic results until I report any error. It'll then fox itself magically as soon as my account is removed from the test ;-) Less annoying "we know better than you what you wanted to search for. Feels good.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jraph 8y agoI was joking, and I actually don't use bangs. I could have made the joke and not actually use Duck Duck Go. Though I use it so... not giving any data to Google is the killer feature for me. I like the idea that the results only depend on the keywords and not me. Instant results are quite nice too. I'd like not to indirectly depend on Microsoft though. Edit: and I'm not bound to Duck Duck Go. I'd be glad to use something else too.
- paulpauper 8y agoif you do this too much , Google will make you solve a verification image also google purposefully returns error codes when searching certain numerical string ranges, probably to prevent people from searching for carelessly indexed credit card and social security databases
- judge2020 8y agoGoogle likely filters out (obvious) credit cards and social security numbers. My theory is that they may suspect another company hired a third-world country click farm to go through and grab large amounts of specific data (or obtaining via other methods, like a rogue extension being used on many "known good" users' G accounts) and are trying to dissuade scraping google for that information. They would much rather you go through the hassle of scraping websites yourself.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y agoI feel nervous about making myself dependent on them because it's more likely than not that Google would pull the rug from under us once we get comfortable with using them.
- dekhn 8y agomost of the operators on that table have existed for over ten years and it's unlikely they will be removed.
- nkurz 8y agoWhat give you this confidence? I discovered the list when I was trying to figure out why "link:" was no longer working, after existing for more than a decade. In another comment here, TeMPOraL says that "define:" (which is on the list) doesn't seem to be supported any more. If it's not making money for Google, and it's not necessary for their internal activities, I wouldn't want to depend on any of these to work in the future.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoMost work, but about 1/4 of them don't :(
- dekhn 8y agolink was intentionally removed, I think about a year ago, with some messaging to the community. I would guess it was being abused.
- throwaway12iii 8y agoBy abused you probably meant abused without payment to Google, or abused by people external to Google. People who pay or are Google can continue their abuse.
- na412 8y agoThe + operator was removed despite being there for a long time. Also there's a whole bunch of wrong info in the article. The most blatant one is that they claim google by default performs an AND search, which even a cursory use of google will demonstrate is not true.
- ilovetux 8y agoDoes anyone know of a similar list for DDG?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sunsetMurk 8y agoHmmmm, I can't find anything nearly as comprehensive. But, that could be because DDG doesn't have all that many. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet&iax=cheatsheet https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go+cheat+sheet&ia=cheats... https://duck.co/help/results/syntax https://duck.co/help/results/syntax I think the coolest thing about DDG are the 'Bang' searches: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- jolmg 8y ago> I think the coolest thing about DDG are the 'Bang' searches: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang I'd use if the typical browsers didn't already have that feature built-in. EDIT: It occurs to me that they don't on mobile, so I guess it's useful there.
- Semaphor 8y agoIf you set it up yourself. But DDG has literally thousands already set up.
- jolmg 8y agoI thought I could set them up myself on DDG, but I see now that the keywords are the same for everyone. I guess this means I can't use super short keywords for the sites I frequent most. That's a shame. For example, in Firefox I just prefix my search query with "s" to search stackage.org. Also, even if they have thousands, I don't think it would be too hard to find a site they don't support. Who knows how long they'd take to add the keyword on request, if they decide to add it. Pros and cons. No solution is perfect. I guess I'd find DDG's feature more useful if I relied more on my phone for such searches or used random computers I can't setup for myself.
- skilled 8y agoI find the comments laughable. If you look at the actual "operators" -- its a bunch of 'inurl' and 'intitle' stuffed with keywords. Heck, give me ten minutes and I will prepare 100 of these operators. Weak article.
- jolmg 8y ago> AND: Search for X and Y. This will return only results related to both X and Y. Note: It doesn’t really make much difference for regular searches, as Google defaults to “AND” anyway. But it’s very useful when paired with other operators. If space equates to AND, then how is it useful? There's really no technical reason to use AND, right? I mean, even if you nest: good1 OR (good2 AND -bad) I imagine it should be equal to: good1 OR (good2 -bad) > define:entrepreneur The : is not needed; one can use a space. Also, I imagine this isn't really an operator, since it doesn't make sense to mix it with any other. Same with "weather:".
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoIt doesn't default to AND. Search some words and you'll often find that one is not in the result anywhere.
- dreamcompiler 8y agoIt defaults to some weird combination like "OR but show ANDs first." Very often when I search for one term it will show X results. When I add a second term it shows Y results, where Y>>X. That's logically impossible with AND.
- yesenadam 8y agoA search with good1 OR (good2 AND -bad) says 549,000 results; good1 OR (good2 -bad) says 2,000,000, and the first page of results looks entirely different.
- xf00 8y agoI frequently use the dash inside a word so that for example a search for sub-optimal returns results including "sub-optimal", "suboptimal" and "sub optimal".
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSome are out of date, I think. I used the "define:" one so often that it became muscle memory for me. I was saddened when it stopped working a couple months ago. It'll still sometimes give you the word definition card, but I think only when just typing the word would give you the same card. I switched to typing "$word dictionary" instead, as I found it to trigger the definition card in almost every case where "define:$word" no longer would.
- black-tea 8y agoI replaced that with a Firefox quick shortcut to Wiktionary a while ago. Much better results than Google had.
- RyanOD 8y agoOf course, this relies on what data Google has on hand. Many of the examples provided in the article work because Google has so much data about "Apple" searches. The more niche the search operator, the more likely no results will surface. That being said, I've always found the "site:", "inurl:", and "+" or "-" operators to be incredibly useful for research reasons.
- overlordalex 8y agoThe article has been slashdotted, but is the '+' operator back? I used to use it all the time until they killed it because they launched google+
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago>"Google defaults to “AND” anyway." Well, kinda. But it's been a few years since it really did. It defaults to "show then what we guess they want rather than what they literally asked for".
- kirkules 8y agoInterpreting your query in a particular way and delivering the results you personally would expect based in that query are not the same thing
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThe philosophy of SERPs! ;oP Sure, you are right, and moreover Google could interpret the request as an AND; but they don't return results that _correctly_ fulfil such a query. So, practically the distinction seems useless? To recapitulate, it's not my interpretation that the results don't match a logical AND, it's a fact.
- nolok 8y agoThat's because we (the people who instinctly know which keyword to use for a search -- or at least we think we do) are the super minority. Most people are absolutely terrible at keywords based searching. Which is not very surprising since most people are terrible at spelling out what they search to begin with, and they're also terrible at turning a sentence into its important keywords, so doing those two things at once brings all the bad. To this day, even with current Google helping them out a ton more, I'm still amazed at most people complete inability to type out what they search for in any meaningful way. Pay attention to how people ask their question when looking for something and you quickly realize they don't ask their question in a logical way, or using the words you would expect. Pay attention to how many time when someone ask you something you feel like saying "What are you actually trying to find/do/achieve ? What is actually your issue, instead of the half-way mess you just said that made no sense ?". And people are also really bad at realizing that and taking a step back, and tech user are not exempt; something like half of stack overflow question are broken that way (totally made up stat). Then add a layer of "this is a computer I need to computerize my query !" and you enter the land of weird. PS: with that said, allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it activated at all time for my account would be totally awesome
- miluge 8y agoAlways have proxies when doing a long list of those or you will get banned for 24 to 32 hours or even worse the Captcha's from hell who never seems to work.
- userbinator 8y agoUnfortunately, public proxies are more than likely going to be banned already. If you have a dynamic IP, that tends to work better (although that makes me wonder if it's possible to get a whole subnet banned, enough to piss off a lot of others on the same ISP, and thus put more pressure on Google to not do it or at least give the practice more public exposure. "Man gets city banned from Google by using Google search to do what it was designed for" would be a funny headline...)
- miluge 8y agoOr dynamic IP's yup! Public proxies have to be "fresh", I personnally use some private + public that were just scraped.
- LiamPa 8y agoSo what is actually happening when I hit search? Have google ever shared the high level process?
- tantalor 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs
- PostThisTooFast 8y agoNot quite right about the + operator: "You can do the same thing by using double quotes around your search." No. The + REQUIRED the term to be present on the page. Google idiotically removed this functionality, claiming that it somehow interfered with "Google Plus." Now that Google Plus is discontinued, have they restored the + operator? Of course not. It's pretty clear at this point that Google sucks at UI, branding, and functional design. Not really sure where they excel.
- josephjrobison 8y agoGreat way for Google to IP advanced users, SEOs, devs.
- juddlyon 8y agoThis post is pretty representative of the AHREFs blog, they are consistently good. Their product is worth the money if you work in digital marketing.
- 3xblah 8y agoI once read that 85% of Google searches are repeat searches, queries that Google has "seen" before. If this is false, please ignore the rest of this comment. If 85% of searches are repeated queries, does this mean Google will treat a query differently if it is a repeated one? If a query looks like a repeat query is it funnelled into a retrieving a set of predetermined results? (To be clear, I am referring to queries that do not match exactly.) No doubt this would be much faster than a "dynamic" search where any similarities to prior queries are ignored. To keep things "fast" it might be necessary to treat the 85% differently from the 15%. It might be beneficial for the search engine provider to encourage users to use repeat searches rather create than new ones. As we know, Google is not transparent regarding the series of steps they use in providing search results from their web cache thus these questions are likely to remain unanswered.
- ElijahLynn 8y agoI am adding this list to my personal "How to be a software engineer" syllabus, for when friends ask me how to get started. Search is a skill at the base of the pyramid. I don't care how much expertise one has, they need to know how to find information, fast.
- sovok_x 8y ago"+" operator was disabled because of their SNS (https://www.wired.com/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-and-how-to-bring-it-back/ https://www.wired.com/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-an...)... don't know why they mention it.
- janebrewer16 8y agoWorth exploring list
- oarfish 8y agoSite is down, anyone got an alternative link?
- hughlang 8y agoAnd yet, I didn't see an operator for "recent" with parameters for last X days. I always need that.
- franze 8y agoWe just had the challenge to search for a raw materials supplier from within the european union. any normal google query was completely useless, so I hacked this EU & EWR Google Search http://lalo.li/eu/index.html http://lalo.li/eu/index.html which helps us to create such fascinating queries like https://www.google.com/search?q=Avocado%20Oil%20site:.eu%20OR%20site:.at%20OR%20site:.be%20OR%20site:.bg%20OR%20site:.hr%20OR%20site:.cy%20OR%20site:.cz%20OR%20site:.dk%20OR%20site:.es%20OR%20site:.de%20OR%20site:.ee%20OR%20site:.fi%20OR%20site:.fr%20OR%20site:.gr%20OR%20site:.hr%20OR%20site:.ir%20OR%20site:.it%20OR%20site:.lv%20OR%20site:.lt%20OR%20site:.lu%20OR%20site:.mt%20OR%20site:.nl%20OR%20site:.pl%20OR%20site:.pt%20OR%20site:.ro%20OR%20site:.sk%20OR%20site:.si%20OR%20site:.es%20OR%20site:.se%20OR%20site:.co.uk
- thatsaguy 8y agoBut do these operators actually perform deterministically? Does the page actually contains a match for my terms? In my experience, this has become less and less true. The first obvious mistake in the list is that google doesn't default to AND anymore since ages. A list of two terms will be some random combination of one of them, maybe both of them, and occasionally none (and no, this doesn't happen due to fetch/indexing lag or stemming or autocorrect). To get true inclusive searches you need to quote the terms, individually. People keep pointing at verbatim search, but verbatim performs phrase search, which is not what you want in most of the cases. DDG suffers from the same. I curse them both. I've used some js to quote individual terms before performing the search to get back useful searches for technical terms. But really, the number of times I now get pages which do not contain the exact terms I'm looking for is subjectively increasing.
- amelius 8y agoMost of these operators are not in Knuth's "Sorting and Searching" book, so I guess it needs an update.
- na412 8y ago>AND >Search for X and Y. This will return only results related to both X and Y. Note: It doesn’t really make much difference for regular searches, as Google defaults to “AND” anyway. But it’s very useful when paired with other operators. The author must be using a different google than me. It's been many, many years since google functioned as an AND search. It very frequently decides to drop one or more words from my search if there is a low number of results, it's extremely annoying. Once you could force the old behaviour with +<term>, and then later with quoting ("term"). Both of those now also tend to drop search terms for me. If anyone has an actually reliable way to get a real AND search out of google, I'm all ears.
- justtopost 8y agoGod I miss boolean search.
- vagab0nd 8y agoI find Google less and less useful these days. My search terms often get turned into something else for no reason. If I search for any less common word, there's a good chance the results would not contain that word by default. Maybe I'm crazy, but is Google really improving over time, or actually getting worse?
- known 8y agoCan we bypass "hellbanned" if we go through duck.com with !g
- Friedduck 8y agoGoogle has increasingly moved away from strictly honoring advanced search terms. Excluding terms (-) or using the exact phrase search no longer returns the desired result. Frustrating.