Search Smart III

Define Operator:
Use the ‘Define:’ operator to get definitions of word(s) without navigating to other sites. Eg: ‘define:mainframe’

Inurl Operator:
Say you forgot a url, but remember some words in the url. If you are going to search for that word(s), Google is going to throw you umpteen number of pages all of which will have the word(s), and finding your url will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. So is there a way to search words only in the url? Yes; there is. Use ‘inurl:’ or ‘allinurl:’ operators. Eg: ‘allinurl: Bill Gates’ will return only pages which have the words ‘Bill’ and ‘Gates’ in the url. You might ask why ‘inurl:’ operator while there is a ‘allinurl:’. Let me illustrate with an eg. Say you want ‘Gates’ to be in the url and ‘Paul Allen’ in the page, then you can use ‘inurl:gates paul allen’.

Filetype Operator:
If you want only pages with a particular type of file type (like doc, jpg, xls, php, xls, swf, pdf etc) to be returned, use the 'filetype:' operator. Eg. 'Hawking filetype:doc'


If you want to find the exact phrase (all words in the same order you entered), give the search string within double quotes. Eg: "Tribute to the Founding Fathers of the Web and the Net" (extremely helpful when you want to look up lyrics, quotes, dialogues etc)

If you want to search for some words and exclude some other words, use the '-' operator. For instance you want to search for virus, but you want the word computer not to be present in results (may be you are a medical student who wants to exclude pages on computer virus). The search would be 'virus -computer'


Google operators can be combined in a number of ways to form ‘Google Microscripts’ to write complex queries and to Search Smart :)