If you’re like me you probably use the Google search engine on a daily basis to find information.

We all probably use Google far more heavily than we realise. It’s become second nature….want to find something… we’ll Google it.

Usually we’ll do a search by just typing in a few keywords relative to the information we are trying to find.

However, did you know that there are some more advanced search techniques that can be used to hone down the search and arrive at a much more useful set of results.

Before we get into that here’s a short video from Google themselves showing someone using Google Search to find information related to Paris. It’s amazing what you can find so easily:

That video was showcasing Google and what’s called Basic Search. But using Advanced Search we can take searching to a new level. Most importantly Advanced Search saves us time!

Advanced Searching

Using Advanced Search is very simple we just place what’s called in Google speak an alternate query type or modifier before our search text in the Google Search window.

Let’s take a look at some of these:

related:

The related: query type will list pages that are similar to a specified page. For instance we could search for:

related:www.synchronoustechnology.net/blog/

This would return all the pages that contained similar information to this blog’s home page. Note that there can be no spaces between the word related: and the page URL

site:

If we use the site: modifier, Google will restrict the search to only the websites that are in the specified domain.

For example we could search for:

surfacing site:www.solidmastermind.com

This will only display relevant pages that contain the word surfacing that it finds within the site www.solidmastermind.com.

The title of a webpage is usually a good indication of its content since the author of the page will have used a short description of the content of the page for the title. As such, restricting the search to just the title can really narrow down the results and hone in on the information we need.

allintitle:

If we use the allinititle: modifier, Google will restrict the search results to those with all of the query words in the title only. For example if we search for:

allintitle: solid edge st2 video training

This will only display pages whose titles contain: solid edge, st2, video, and training. This really narrows down our search results.

intitle:

If we want to widen the above search out a little we can use the intitle: modifier, Google will then restrict the results to only those pages that have a title that contains the word following the modifier. For instance if we searched for:

intitle:st2 update training videos

This would return all pages that have st2 in the title and then update, training and videos somewhere in the document or page itself. Notice there is no space between intitle: and the word we want to search for in the title. If we preceeded every word with the intitle: modifier, this would give the same results as the allintitle: modifier.

allinurl:

If we use the allinurl: modifier in the search, Google will only return pages that contain all of the search words in the actual URL of the page. For instance we could search for:

allinurl: solid edge st2 update videos

inurl:

Once again, in order to widen the search we can use the inurl: modifier in the same way we did for the intitle: modifier. For instance we could search for:

inurl:st2 inurl:update solid edge videos

This would return all pages that have st2 and update in the title and then solid edge and videos somewhere in the document or page itself. Notice there is no space between inurl: and the word we want to search for in the title. If we preceeded every word with the inurl: modifier, this would give the same results as the allinurl: modifier.

As we can see the Advanced Search tools can really help target our searches.

Here are a few clickable examples for you to try should you be looking for Solid Edge training:

related:www.synchronoustechnology.net/blog

surfacing site:www.solidmastermind.com

allintitle: solid edge st2 video training

intitle:st2 update training videos

allinurl: solid edge st2 update videos

inurl:st2 inurl:update solid edge videos

Top Searching,

Jon Sutcliffe.