Google Search Grammar Guidance
Search engine is playing an important role in today's life style. We use search engine to get almost everything we need. Sometimes we don't know what to do if there's sudden electricity off or network down because we can't get on web for shopping or any kind communication. Since the search engine almost occupied our daily life, do you know how to get the accurate search result in short time? Here I would like to introduce some useful search engine grammar and hope they will be helpful to your internet surfing.
Google and Yahoo are two of the most popular search engines in the world and they're actually doing different work while doing the search stuff. Yahoo will only index page title and meta descriptions which is called "The searchable subject index". However, things are completely different from google, google uses something called "full-text search" which will index out everything via google spider. The grammars below will be mainly focus on google and most of which will work on other search engiens too.
intitle: Search you specified title only
Ex. intitle:barackobama
inurl: Search keyword that's included in website url. It's quite helpful if you're looking for some tutorials or documentations
Ex. inurl:help
intext: Only search the content page regardless the page title or url structures
Ex. intext:"yahoo.com"
inanchor: Search the anchor text hyperlinks only. What's anchor text? that means you specify a keywords and link to a specific web page, the hyperlinked keywords is called anchor text. For example "web hosting" is anchor text.
Ex. inanchor:"tompeters"
site: The most popular grammar used by webmasters. It's used to list out web pages under a site or number of domains for some specific domain extensions.
Ex. site:website.com
site:gov
site:edu
link: List out all pages that link back to a specific url. the results from yahoo explorer is accurate while it's not from google.
Ex. link:http://www.google.com
cache: If your website is changed frequently, this grammar is useful to get screenshot of some older versions.
Ex. cache:www.yahoo.com
filetype: Search the specific file extensions. Quite useful for downloading purpose such as PowerPoint(PPT), PDF documents etc.
Ex. linuxlearningfiletype:pdf
"leadingeconomicindicators"filetype:ppt
related: Search related website/page of you specified pages. For example if you search related:google.com you will get many other search engine names such as HotBot,Yahoo!, ask etc.
Ex. related:www.yahoo.com
related:www.cnn.com
info: Show out almost every pages that have link to a specific url including google cache.
Ex. info:www.oreilly.com
phonebook: Used for telephone number looking up, both number to group and group to numbers.
Ex. phonebook:JohnDoeCA
phonebook:(510)555-1212
There're more grammars not in the list but not used so frequently in our daily life. If we can use above search grammar efficiently we'll save lots of time in getting what we expected on internet.
