That’s why you often get dished up results you’re not interested in. Use the minus (-) sign to remove multiple words from any search result. Is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes.

This helps ensure that we’ll find the most current and up-to-date information when we’re doing research. This search operator allows you to narrow your Google search to results that appear on a specific web domain. In this example, we’re asking Google to tell pop tarts divorce papers us the speed of a Mustang – but we’re looking for info about the plane, not the car. By including the keyword “Ford” with the minus-sign modifier, we can exclude results that talk about the Ford vehicle and we’ll be left with more search results about planes.

Once you have found all of the mentions for a particular theme, you can see who has written the articles. Next, you want to double-check how often they have written about that subject, to make sure they are the right person to contact. This is a good way to find competitors’ content, but it is also excellent for checking for sites either like your own or similar to one of your target sites. If you then search for that specific infographic, you will find all of the sites that featured it and may be willing to feature yours too. Secondly, it is a great way to find out whether anyone has already created a resource on something you are creating. This means you can either find data to help with a campaign or, if no one has compiled a resource yet, you can make your own — which is a great way of attracting links when people use it.

Using the ‘cache’ search operator will allow you to check the most recent cache that Google has of a particular domain or URL. Just enter the keywords and up come the results you want, right? Use double quotation marks to search for multiple words next to each other in the specified order , e.g., “climate change” or “the impact of climate change on food security”. Otherwise, Google automatically combines multiple words with the operator AND. Use the Advanced search option to search in specific ‘fields’ or to limit results by year range.

Use the minus character before the phrase you want to exclude from the result. For example, I’m looking for “best smartphone” but want to avoid results that include “iPhone”. Google compiled billions of web pages every day and list them every time you are searching for something.

If you want to make sure that some of the keywords are definitely included in every search result, you can use the + operator before that certain word. This is useful if you’re specifically searching within a niche topic. If you put quotation marks around a word or phrase, the search results will only contain results that match exactly the word or phrase in the quotes. Using search operators is as simple as doing a Google searchExcept in special cases (such as the “in” operator), Google will return standard organic results. Just like Gmail search operators, using Google search operators help you find exactly what you are looking for in everyone’s favorite search engine.

Because the results aren’t filtered and you didn’t exclude the word “standing” from your search, you had to skim through a ton of results that weren’t relevant to what you wanted. With those words excluded, you get a refined list of websites with the industrial steel drums you want. With the minus sign, you’re telling Google that you don’t want to see any results that contain those particular words. By using these commands, a list of more relevant results will appear. This saves you time and gives you only the information you need, faster.

While they may be useful in some cases, it’s usually more helpful to focus on the actual search results. In the example below, we’ve used the same search terms to look for images instead of websites. If you see an image you like, you can click to visit the website it originally came from. If you’re having trouble thinking of new search terms, you can use search suggestions instead. These will usually appear as you’re typing, and they’re a great way to find new keywords you might not have tried otherwise.