Google Search Tricks

Here is an overview of some of the most useful basic searching tricks which can increase our productivity at work.

Raghav Sharma
2 min readSep 6, 2021
Google Search

One of the key skills nowadays is to effectively search for a solution to a problem or error.

Tricks:

Site:

If you need more specific results from a single website, this command brings those results up.

Example:

if you wanted to search error message of code from stackoverflow website, you would use the following:

“site:stackoverflow.com custom error”.

Exclude Words: (-)

This command excludes words that you don’t want to appear in the search results.

Example:

If, for some reason, you wanted to find pages with the word “orange,” as a fruit but not orange as a colour, you would type:

“orange-color”.

Add words: (+)

You can use a plus sign to add words that you want to be included in the results of your google search

Example:

“swift + iOS + developer”.

Wildcard: (*)

Use an asterisk as a wildcard to represent a space where anything can be filled.

Example:

“Top * ranking factors”

“Could not type case from * to *”.

Before: and After:

The new commands allows users to restrict searches to specific dates.

“The before: & after: commands return documents before & after a date.

Example:

“avengers endgame before:2019”

“avengers endgame after:2019–03–01 before:2019–03–05”.

Search Internationally

Normally when you search Amazon, results are customised to the country it thinks you’re in based on our IP address. If you’re in USA, for example, you’ll be directed to Amazon.co.in instead of Amazon.com.

Example:

If you’d like to get results for other countries, however, you can do that as below.This will search internationally .

Here NCR stands for no country redirect

“amazon.com/ncr”.

Quotes (“”)

Using quotes, around the phrases you are searching for, will help you find results that are exact match results and in same order.

Example use:

“it was a great movie”.

Find Specific Files

filetype: lets you search for specific files on the web rather than content or websites. when you want to find ebook with .pdf extensions.

Example:

To search for pdfs on the given topic of Design Pattern

filetype:pdf Design Patterns”.

Thanks for reading through the list. Please feel free to drop off any suggestions and improvements.

we can also connect in below mentioned forums.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghav-sharma-0960a1144/

Github: https://github.com/raghav1786

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