I have created this tutorial to demonstate some of the more advance searching techniques in the worlds most famous search engine Google (google.com for the none of you that dont know). I am going to discuss features that can be used to googles best abilities and find almost any thing. Using this technique you can download just about any tutorials, texts, ebooks, mp3s etc... first off i do not promote nor do i encourage warez so by reading this (in your head or out loud) you give up the right to blame me if you get caught. Right then now that thats out of the way lets get onto some searching!!

:: Keyword Amounts ::
When you go to Google and you plan on searching something e.g. networking Google will search its billions of indexed web pages for the string "networking" that occurs in the page at least once and displays the link to it on the search results. However, what would happen if you typed: networking networking
Google would search its mass of indexed webpages and display the links to the ones that have the word Networking twice or more. So typing something twice in Google will probably get more descriptive/detailed web pages.

:: Quotes ::
Ahh now, here i will introduce quotes. In the last paragraph i explained that when you type a keyword into Google then it searches is massive vault of indexed webpages for that keyword, well what if you wanted to search google for this:

Fair enough, you want to search for harry potter, but can you spot whats wrong with it? It would find pages that have "harry potter" in and "harry" and "potter" giving you a list of pages completely off the mark and nothing to do with harry potter. This is where we introduce quotes, so enclose quotes around your search string to form this:

now Google would only look for pages with the string "Harry Potter" in the page, so if a page had "harry" in but not "potter" Google wouldn't include that in its results.

:: Including and Excluding Keywords ::
Now i find this interesting, with this you can really make Google do tricks like a Dog giving you its paw. Whilst searching a subject you may be trying to search a specific area of a subject. E.g. you search for "Networking" but you only want to find pages on Wireless networking, well as in the last paragraph you cannot simply type:

try typing...

you will get information on wireless networking but you will also still get information on wired/normal networking techniques. E.g. if a page has this written on it:

This is where "Including and Excluding" comes in, using the + and - signs you can include and exclude strings from your search. E.g.

will give you information on wireless networking routers but nothing on wired networking, see what i mean.

:: Site and Link parameters ::
I will now tell you about finding information on a certain website or finding out what sites are linking back to a specific site. Now the "site:url" command basically tells Google to only look for the following data on the site 'url'. E.g.

will search the site "trap17.com" for the string "Free Hosting" not "Free", not "Hosting" but "Free Hosting", if the website doesn't contain the exact string "Free Hosting" then Google will not return anything because it cant find anything. Another example:

With that Google will search all websites that have the extension ".co.uk" appended to the end of their url and look through all the .co.uk websites for the words "Free" and "Email".
Now onto the "link:" command. Now the link command finds links in its indexed webpages. For example you submit to Google, 'link:google.com', and it will find all the webpages with a link to google on it. Like the 'site:' command you can also search domain extensions. 'link:.org.uk' will find all the webpages with links to UK Organizations.

:: Search Titles, URLs and Filetypes ::
Google has the ability to search webpages' titles and urls. You can search for a keyword in the url or title, for example:

will search for all the pages google has indexed on google.com, its just like the site: command except not as accurate in my opinion. One feature that can be said for the inurl command though is that it can search for filenames as well, e.g. 'inurl:hotmail.com/INDEX.HTML' where as the 'site:' command cannot, it can only search the url from: www. to .com/.org/.net/etc...
Now about searching titles...
the 'intitle:' is extremely handy, you can search for webpages on anything like this:

will search for a harry potter fan site, you can also find empty directories issuing this command:

because "Index of" is the default text shown on a directory with no index page and no htaccess code protecting it it will search all of its indexed pages for empty directories.
Now onto the Filetypes, Google can also search specific filetypes, say c source code if you wanted to. The basic command is

you can use this in conjunction with the site command to find some neat stuff, it can also be used maliciously you'll know what i mean after this.

that will tell Google to look for the indexed pages of microsoft.com that are ASP pages and the url contains "admin/login" so basically it is looking for something like "microsoft.com/restricted/admin/login.asp" or something like that, you can now see why it is a security flaw, it can find pages you cant.

:: Other Info ::
Now Google can be stopped from peeking its nosy little robots into your site by creating a ROBOTS file, it basically tells automatic spider robots (automated programs sent from search engines like Google to index your pages and give the search engine a list of pages). Now im not going to go into the subject in this tutorial because this is on Google. But i have just done a quick search on Google and found:

which is a tutorial on the subject.
Now you may be curious to see what robot files look like, well lets use what i've shown you today,

Will search for all pages that has 'robots.txt' in the URL of the site and the filetype is a txt file.
Just to let you know that all of the explained above togetther can create a very powerful search query and allow a user to find almost anything on Google and virtually the Internet because Google has Billions of pages indexed on more subjects you could ever think of.

This has not been a complete search guide to Google but should get you started.
You can find more info on advance google searching at: http://www.google.co.uk/help/operators.html
or i can save you alot of time instead of reading all this and just go to Googles Advance Search form page http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Hope you enjoyed it and found it very informative and edumacational



This post has been edited by rejected: Mar 23 2006, 03:30 AM

Wow.. I have to say, that is truely amazing! I never knew that google could be so useful! Thanks for this tutorial I wish I was good at something so I could post a tutorial

great stuff. there is a more elaborated guide at google...which tells you how to use it's calculator (scientific!!!) too.

Thanks for the great tutorial.

Another feature of google's search that i use all the time (especially for school) is the define: function.

You can type in define:table for example and you will get all the definitions for that word. It's faster than going to a dictionary website and looking it up.

This should help alot of people, especially since regular google searching reveals the less relevant results first usually. At least from my experience without going to advanced search.

Hey Google fans!

I think I know another cool google trick. You can also use it as calculator. If you type 5 +7 for example, the next page loaded will return the result. Try it out. Google also has some hidden things like if you type funny stuff you will get a google collection of funny stuff. Let me know if you find other cool google stuff. I wanne know !!!!!!!!

Nice tutorial! I knew about most of those commands (I used them just about every time I search). However, I did still learn some new ones. With all those tips, that makes advanced searching quicker (since you don't have to go to the advanced search page). Great job! Hopefully this will help people find more of what they're looking for on Google.