9 Useful Google Internet Search Tips And Tricks

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Ever found yourself searching for some topic on Google, and coming up with absolutely nothing that you can use? The internet is full of content – some of it very good, a lot of it marginally good, and some that’s downright bad. What you need are a few internet search tips and tricks.

We’ve come up with nine of the most useful Google internet search tips and tricks to help you laser focus your searching so you can stop wasting time, getting sidetracked and frustrated.

Here they are:

Google internet search tips and tricks

1. How to exclude results and words – say you’re looking for some new chocolate dessert recipes, but you don’t want any that use flour. You’re trying hard to lose a few pounds, and cutting out that white carb will help, while still giving you the taste of the rich dark chocolate you dream about. To do this, just use the ‘-‘ sign before the word you want to exclude. Your search would look like this: chocolate dessert recipes –flour.
2. You’re looking for a specific phrase, and want to get more focused results. Just enclose your search terms in double quotes. This will bring results that contain that exact phrase, narrowing down the search results considerably.  For example: “flourless chocolate cake”.
3. You might be wanting to find out whether your favorite recipe site has that chocolate dessert . Here’s where you use the “site:somesite.com” modifier. And here’s your example: “flourless chocolate cake” site:allrecipes.com  Check it out – over30,000 entries!! People do love their chocolate!
4. If you’re searching for specific file types, then ther’s a modifier for that too. Use “filetype:xxx”. So, if you want to find a pdf that has chocolate cake recipes, you would be able to zero in by entering “chocolate cake recipes” filetype:pdf  And yup – I found 615 results for that one.
5. Now suppose you want to find all the possibilities for dark chocolate cakes, but also want to include synonyms in your search.  .  To do this, use the “~” in front of the word. Here’s what you’d use: “chocolate cake” ~dark and you’ll find results for dark chocolate cake, black chocolate cake, deep dark chocolate cake, and so on.
6. It’s really easy to eliminate results from any particular site that you don’t want to be listed. This can be very helpful when you want to eliminate links from ecommerce sites when you are searching for product information. It’s similar to #1 above. If we don’t like allrecipes.com, we’d enter “chocolate cake” –site:allrecipes.com
7. If you’re tired of lots of useless and impractical stuff coming up, that may just have your search phrase buried somewhere deep in the text, you can use the title search. This brings up results that have your phrase in the title – much more likely to be what you’re searching for. It looks like this: intitle:dark chocolate cake
8. You can do a similar search, if you’re looking for a particular url.  The words you search for must be in the permalinks. Here is how it would look: inurl:deep dark chocolate cake
9. Suppose you like a particular site – such as allrecipes.com, and you’d like to find more sites like it, that are related to it. Well, here’s how you do it: just enter related:allrecipes.com and you’ll have all the related recipe sites come up – 196 of them. Lots of chocolate cake recipes!

Now that you have all these handy, dandy Google internet search tips and tricks to play with… I’m going to head for the kitchen and bake one of those deep dark flourless chocolate cakes!