
Google Search Operators: A Complete List (2018) - nkurz
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
======
hackersword
I've found it the case if you do more then one "advanced" searches using these
operators, your flagged as "unusual activity" and have to do captcha to prove
you not a bot.

~~~
jjoonathan
I got "hellbanned" the other day -- google kept giving me captchas but always
marked my answers incorrect. 20 minutes later, I gave up and drove to the
library (!).

It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they
have slowly obtained over my life.

~~~
DKWf8EV
I don't think you really got hellbanned, Google captchas have just become
extremely buggy in recent months. Whenever I have to solve one it always takes
me a few tries, sometimes a dozen or more, and I usually triple check whether
I've actually selected all the traffic lights/bicycles/chimneys/whatevers
before submitting...

(Alternative hypothesis: If you solve a captcha correctly, they intentionally
give you a few more, to get more good data for their AI algos.)

~~~
warent
I'm inclined to go with your alternative hypothesis. The quality of the
captcha response degrades the more times you solve it consecutively.

I was recently developing a web frontend that had a captcha implementation on
the login form. The first couple times I solved the captcha there was no
problem. Then once it got to fourth and fifth one it started making me solve a
few of captcha pages in a row. Eventually it was forcing me to solve several
pages of "Select the picture of the fire hydrant" over and over, often marking
it as incorrect when it definitely wasn't, and then restarting back from the
beginning so each run-through took multiple minutes forcing you to solve
dozens of captcha pages before accepting it as correct.

So, to add to your hypothesis, they're probably doing this intentionally not
only to get more data for their AI algos, but also to mitigate people training
bots on CAPTCHAs.

EDIT: Also the fact that you're being downvoted is baffling to me but my
tinfoil hat persona makes me wonder if it's some orchestrated downvote because
you're pointing out a hypothesis that Google is trying to keep hidden.

~~~
kbenson
It's both. The more consecutive CAPTCHAs you solve in a short period, the more
likely Google is to assume you're not a human (or not up to any good), but you
definitely can get google browsing identity (however they tag you as a
combination of IP, browser fingerprint, etc) to the point that they won't
every consider enough responses a good indicator. I've done it many times, and
yes, it usually is fixed within a few hours or the next day.

------
pbhjpbhj
>"Google defaults to “AND” anyway."

Well, kinda. But it's been a few years since it really did. It defaults to
"show then what we guess they want rather than what they literally asked for".

~~~
nolok
That's because we (the people who instinctly know which keyword to use for a
search -- or at least we think we do) are the super minority.

Most people are absolutely terrible at keywords based searching. Which is not
very surprising since most people are terrible at spelling out what they
search to begin with, and they're also terrible at turning a sentence into its
important keywords, so doing those two things at once brings all the bad.

To this day, even with current Google helping them out a ton more, I'm still
amazed at most people complete inability to type out what they search for in
any meaningful way.

Pay attention to how people ask their question when looking for something and
you quickly realize they don't ask their question in a logical way, or using
the words you would expect. Pay attention to how many time when someone ask
you something you feel like saying "What are you actually trying to
find/do/achieve ? What is actually your issue, instead of the half-way mess
you just said that made no sense ?". And people are also really bad at
realizing that and taking a step back, and tech user are not exempt; something
like half of stack overflow question are broken that way (totally made up
stat).

Then add a layer of "this is a computer I need to computerize my query !" and
you enter the land of weird.

PS: with that said, allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it
activated at all time for my account would be totally awesome

~~~
nkurz
> allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it activated at all time
> for my account would be totally awesome

You can mostly solve this by creating a keyword search that launches a
verbatim search. Depending on your browser, the syntax probably looks
something like this (with the essential part being the 'tbs=li:1'):

    
    
      https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&tbs=li:1
    

Then add a single letter keyword (I use 'v') so that you can search type 'v
verbatim' to do a verbatim Google search for 'verbatim'. I suppose you could
even make this the default search, and use something else if you ever want
'normal' mode.

Of course, this still leaves the problem that verbatim on Google doesn't
always mean 'verbatim' anymore, but that part will have to wait until Google
changes their ways (unless you put quotes around every word).

~~~
scarmig
You could create keyword that points to a site that takes a regular query and
redirects you to a Google search with every provided word quoted. Though
someone would have to create that site.

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TeMPOraL
Some are out of date, I think. I used the "define:" one so often that it
became muscle memory for me. I was saddened when it stopped working a couple
months ago. It'll still sometimes give you the word definition card, but I
think only when just typing the word would give you the same card. I switched
to typing "$word dictionary" instead, as I found it to trigger the definition
card in almost every case where "define:$word" no longer would.

~~~
RyanOD
Of course, this relies on what data Google has on hand. Many of the examples
provided in the article work because Google has so much data about "Apple"
searches. The more niche the search operator, the more likely no results will
surface. That being said, I've always found the "site:", "inurl:", and "+" or
"-" operators to be incredibly useful for research reasons.

~~~
overlordalex
The article has been slashdotted, but is the '+' operator back? I used to use
it all the time until they killed it because they launched google+

~~~
RyanOD
Ahhh, yes. I really meant the "-" operator and not the "+" operator.

------
thatsaguy
But do these operators actually perform deterministically? Does the page
_actually_ contains a match for my terms? In my experience, this has become
less and less true.

The first obvious mistake in the list is that google doesn't default to AND
anymore since ages. A list of two terms will be some random combination of one
of them, maybe both of them, and occasionally _none_ (and no, this doesn't
happen due to fetch/indexing lag or stemming or autocorrect).

To get true inclusive searches you need to quote the terms, _individually_.
People keep pointing at verbatim search, but verbatim performs _phrase_
search, which is _not_ what you want in most of the cases.

DDG suffers from the same. I curse them both. I've used some js to quote
individual terms before performing the search to get back useful searches for
technical terms.

But really, the number of times I now get pages which do not contain the exact
terms I'm looking for is subjectively increasing.

------
paulpauper
if you do this too much , Google will make you solve a verification image

also google purposefully returns error codes when searching certain numerical
string ranges, probably to prevent people from searching for carelessly
indexed credit card and social security databases

~~~
judge2020
Google likely filters out (obvious) credit cards and social security numbers.
My theory is that they may suspect another company hired a third-world country
click farm to go through and grab large amounts of specific data (or obtaining
via other methods, like a rogue extension being used on many "known good"
users' G accounts) and are trying to dissuade scraping google for that
information. They would much rather you go through the hassle of scraping
websites yourself.

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3xblah
I once read that 85% of Google searches are repeat searches, queries that
Google has "seen" before. If this is false, please ignore the rest of this
comment.

If 85% of searches are repeated queries, does this mean Google will treat a
query differently if it is a repeated one?

If a query _looks like_ a repeat query is it funnelled into a retrieving a set
of predetermined results?

(To be clear, I am referring to queries that do not match exactly.)

No doubt this would be much faster than a "dynamic" search where any
similarities to prior queries are ignored.

To keep things "fast" it might be necessary to treat the 85% differently from
the 15%.

It might be beneficial for the search engine provider to encourage users to
use repeat searches rather create than new ones.

As we know, Google is not transparent regarding the series of steps they use
in providing search results from their web cache thus these questions are
likely to remain unanswered.

~~~
samrohn
yes. This is true.
[https://youtu.be/o6zfp6lRw2E?t=89](https://youtu.be/o6zfp6lRw2E?t=89)

------
na412
>AND

>Search for X and Y. This will return only results related to both X and Y.
Note: It doesn’t really make much difference for regular searches, as Google
defaults to “AND” anyway. But it’s very useful when paired with other
operators.

The author must be using a different google than me. It's been many, many
years since google functioned as an AND search. It very frequently decides to
drop one or more words from my search if there is a low number of results,
it's extremely annoying. Once you could force the old behaviour with +<term>,
and then later with quoting ("term"). Both of those now also tend to drop
search terms for me.

If anyone has an actually reliable way to get a real AND search out of google,
I'm all ears.

------
xf00
I frequently use the dash inside a word so that for example a search for sub-
optimal returns results including "sub-optimal", "suboptimal" and "sub
optimal".

------
sovok_x
"+" operator was disabled because of their SNS
([https://www.wired.com/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-
an...](https://www.wired.com/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-and-how-to-
bring-it-back/))... don't know why they mention it.

------
franze
We just had the challenge to search for a raw materials supplier from within
the european union. any normal google query was completely useless, so I
hacked this EU & EWR Google Search

[http://lalo.li/eu/index.html](http://lalo.li/eu/index.html)

which helps us to create such fascinating queries like

    
    
        https://www.google.com/search?q=Avocado%20Oil%20site:.eu%20OR%20site:.at%20OR%20site:.be%20OR%20site:.bg%20OR%20site:.hr%20OR%20site:.cy%20OR%20site:.cz%20OR%20site:.dk%20OR%20site:.es%20OR%20site:.de%20OR%20site:.ee%20OR%20site:.fi%20OR%20site:.fr%20OR%20site:.gr%20OR%20site:.hr%20OR%20site:.ir%20OR%20site:.it%20OR%20site:.lv%20OR%20site:.lt%20OR%20site:.lu%20OR%20site:.mt%20OR%20site:.nl%20OR%20site:.pl%20OR%20site:.pt%20OR%20site:.ro%20OR%20site:.sk%20OR%20site:.si%20OR%20site:.es%20OR%20site:.se%20OR%20site:.co.uk

------
jraph
I tried !ddg and !duck but it does not quite work. This Google search engine
feels a bit strange and lacking. I hope they will catch up in this competitive
market some day. I want to like it because it has a few nice features and I've
tried it a few times but I always return to my good old regular search engine.

~~~
trulyrandom
Which DuckDuckGo features, other than bangs, do you miss in Google Search?

~~~
eitland
Better instant results fron Stack Overflow.

Less _stupid_ A/B tests (sometimes I'd get idiotic results until I report
_any_ error. It'll then fox itself magically as soon as my account is removed
from the test ;-)

Less annoying "we know better than you what you wanted to search for.

Feels good.

------
ElijahLynn
I am adding this list to my personal "How to be a software engineer" syllabus,
for when friends ask me how to get started. Search is a skill at the base of
the pyramid. I don't care how much expertise one has, they need to know how to
find information, fast.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
I feel nervous about making myself dependent on them because it's more likely
than not that Google would pull the rug from under us once we get comfortable
with using them.

~~~
dekhn
most of the operators on that table have existed for over ten years and it's
unlikely they will be removed.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Most work, but about 1/4 of them don't :(

~~~
dekhn
link was intentionally removed, I think about a year ago, with some messaging
to the community. I would guess it was being abused.

~~~
throwaway12iii
By abused you probably meant abused without payment to Google, or abused by
people external to Google. People who pay or are Google can continue their
abuse.

------
ilovetux
Does anyone know of a similar list for DDG?

~~~
sunsetMurk
Hmmmm, I can't find anything nearly as comprehensive. But, that could be
because DDG doesn't have all that many.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go+cheat+sheet&ia=cheats...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet&iax=cheatsheet)

[https://duck.co/help/results/syntax](https://duck.co/help/results/syntax)

I think the coolest thing about DDG are the 'Bang' searches:
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

~~~
jolmg
> I think the coolest thing about DDG are the 'Bang' searches:
> [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

I'd use if the typical browsers didn't already have that feature built-in.

EDIT: It occurs to me that they don't on mobile, so I guess it's useful there.

~~~
Semaphor
If you set it up yourself. But DDG has literally thousands already set up.

~~~
jolmg
I thought I could set them up myself on DDG, but I see now that the keywords
are the same for everyone. I guess this means I can't use super short keywords
for the sites I frequent most. That's a shame. For example, in Firefox I just
prefix my search query with "s" to search stackage.org.

Also, even if they have thousands, I don't think it would be too hard to find
a site they don't support. Who knows how long they'd take to add the keyword
on request, if they decide to add it.

Pros and cons. No solution is perfect. I guess I'd find DDG's feature more
useful if I relied more on my phone for such searches or used random computers
I can't setup for myself.

------
miluge
Always have proxies when doing a long list of those or you will get banned for
24 to 32 hours or even worse the Captcha's from hell who never seems to work.

~~~
userbinator
Unfortunately, public proxies are more than likely going to be banned already.
If you have a dynamic IP, that tends to work better (although that makes me
wonder if it's possible to get a whole subnet banned, enough to piss off a lot
of others on the same ISP, and thus put more pressure on Google to not do it
or at least give the practice more public exposure. "Man gets city banned from
Google by using Google search to do what it was designed for" would be a funny
headline...)

~~~
miluge
Or dynamic IP's yup! Public proxies have to be "fresh", I personnally use some
private + public that were just scraped.

------
juddlyon
This post is pretty representative of the AHREFs blog, they are consistently
good.

Their product is worth the money if you work in digital marketing.

------
hughlang
And yet, I didn't see an operator for "recent" with parameters for last X
days. I always need that.

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vagab0nd
I find Google less and less useful these days.

My search terms often get turned into something else for no reason. If I
search for any less common word, there's a good chance the results would not
contain that word by default. Maybe I'm crazy, but is Google really improving
over time, or actually getting worse?

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known
Can we bypass "hellbanned" if we go through duck.com with !g

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Friedduck
Google has increasingly moved away from strictly honoring advanced search
terms. Excluding terms (-) or using the exact phrase search no longer returns
the desired result. Frustrating.

------
jolmg
> AND: Search for X and Y. This will return only results related to both X and
> Y. Note: It doesn’t really make much difference for regular searches, as
> Google defaults to “AND” anyway. But it’s very useful when paired with other
> operators.

If space equates to AND, then how is it useful? There's really no technical
reason to use AND, right? I mean, even if you nest:

    
    
       good1 OR (good2 AND -bad)
    

I imagine it should be equal to:

    
    
       good1 OR (good2 -bad)
    
    

> define:entrepreneur

The : is not needed; one can use a space. Also, I imagine this isn't really an
operator, since it doesn't make sense to mix it with any other. Same with
"weather:".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It doesn't default to AND. Search some words and you'll often find that one is
not in the result anywhere.

~~~
dreamcompiler
It defaults to some weird combination like "OR but show ANDs first." Very
often when I search for one term it will show X results. When I add a second
term it shows Y results, where Y>>X. That's logically impossible with AND.

------
josephjrobison
Great way for Google to IP advanced users, SEOs, devs.

------
amelius
Most of these operators are not in Knuth's "Sorting and Searching" book, so I
guess it needs an update.

------
LiamPa
So what is actually happening when I hit search? Have google ever shared the
high level process?

~~~
tantalor
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs)

------
oarfish
Site is down, anyone got an alternative link?

------
justtopost
God I miss boolean search.

------
pighive
This is cool!

------
janebrewer16
Worth exploring list

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skilled
I find the comments laughable. If you look at the actual "operators" \-- its a
bunch of 'inurl' and 'intitle' stuffed with keywords.

Heck, give me ten minutes and I will prepare 100 of these operators. Weak
article.

~~~
dekhn
your comment is nonsensical as it does not match the article.

