Google as the world’s popular search engine has many featured search options. For example, you may find weather forecast (using phrase weather: before mentioning your location) or calculate the mathematical phrase by writing it in Google search field.

But for sites owners the interest is in featured search, to get more information about the site position, site backlinks or when and what version of site Google has cached. So lets go)

First option is info:yoursite.com – it offers you a general information on the website  (e.g. info:cogniance.com). It will present information about entered web page. On the opened page you also see several other link:

• cache:yoursite.com (e.g. cache:cogniance.com) displays cached web page, instead of the current page version. On the cached version of a page, Google will highlight terms in your query that appear after the cache: search operator (e.g. cache:cogniance.com software)
• related:yoursite.com (e.g. related:cogniance.com) lists web pages that are similar to the web page you entered.
• link:yoursite.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com) shows pages that are linked to that questioned site. Also you will find backlinks on your site. To exclude a certain website from search query type -site:site.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com -site:cogniance.com)
• site:yoursite.com (e.g. site:cogniance.com) restricts your search results to the site or domain you specify.The same option as to the previous one – you can include or remove the site from where the link would go to your site (e.g. - site:google.com).

allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl: show the search results with specified phrase in text/title/URL/subject. For example,

• allintext:software consultancy
• allintitle:software consultancy
• allinurl:software consultancy

Tag define, another operator, is also very useful for definitions search; you can specify any word or phrase and the definition for it will be found in Google. For example, define:software

The main and mostly used search operators are mentioned above. What other do you know which you think would be useful for site owners?

Written by Yuliya Leonova

Tags: online communication, seo, web technologies

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Marketing & Optimization, Web 2.0 technologies.
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One Response to “Main Google search operators, what do you think?”

• roberto says:

  September 25, 2009 at 7:53 am

  Two years ago i developed for my company an hight level language and an interpreter (an API façade) to permit a client to built some query to google search. As you know there is also the possibility to install the google desktop search, the fact is that it use the same syntax and operators, having the same engine, so building a ‘wrap’ to this API permit to built a query that search on your documents and their contents and the web at the same time if you want.
  the syntax is a little bit complex but have an infinity of possibility, just investigating we found that is possible to construct almost infinte query, the total operators list is not well documented, we found some operator not reported and waste a lot of time to gain infomation, but its power pay for the fatigue.
  greetings
  roberto