Google Search Operators that Help Maximize Efficiency
Making the most of your time is an important component in all of our daily routines, and in the public relations industry this could not be more true. As the age-old expression goes “time is money” and PR pros are always looking for ways to get tasks completed in a more efficient manner. Search engines, like Google, are some of the most used tools when scouring the internet for information – in fact, Google receives six billion searches per day – but far too often you will find there are too many unrelated results for your search. To maximize your efforts and obtain the best results faster, search operators like symbols and words can be added to your search to narrow down your results the first time.
Keep in mind that when you search using an operator, you don’t want to add any spaces between the operator and your query. A search for site:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com will not. Although there are many different search operators that could be used to boost the efficiency of your search, here are the ones that we use frequently:
1) Search for an exact word or phrase –> “search”
Use quotes to search for an exact word or set of words on a web page. This is helpful when searching for song lyrics or a line from a book. But only use this if you’re looking for an exact word or phrase, otherwise you’ll exclude many helpful results by mistake.
“imagine all the people”
2) Exclude a word –> -search
Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.
jaguar speed -car
pandas -site:wikipedia.org
3) Search within a site or domain –> site:
Get results only from certain sites or domains. For example, you can find all mentions of “olympics” on the NBC website, or any .gov websites.
olympics site:nbc.com
olympics site:.gov
4) Fill in the blank –> *
Add an asterisk within a search as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms. Use with quotation marks to find variations of that exact phrase or to remember words in the middle of a phrase.
“a * saved is a * earned”
5) Find information about a site –> info:
Get information about a URL, including the cached version of the page, similar pages, and pages that link to the site.
info:google.com
6) Search for pages that are similar to a URL –> related:
Find sites that are similar to a URL you already know. If you search for related sites to the Time.com, you’ll find other news publication sites you may be interested in.
related:time.com
For a full list of search operators click here:
