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This reference file explains Google's search syntax for the Google
Search appliance.
Topics:
The Basic Search
To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the
Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant
results.
Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are
both important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not
only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the
value of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages in
which your query terms are near each other.
Note: Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted to HTML for
indexing; however, the HTML is not displayed.
Spelling
A single spelling suggestion is returned with the results for
queries where the spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.
The spell checker feature is context sensitive. For example,
if the query submitted is "gail divers," "gail devers" is suggested as an alternative
query. However, "scuba divers" would not return an alternate
query suggestion.
Note: Currently, the spell checker supports only US
English.
Synonyms
Synonyms are other words that have the same or similar
meanings. They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on
the results page.
Sorting by
Date
The Sort by Date feature sorts and presents your search
results based on date. The date of each file is returned in the results.
Results that do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted by
relevance.
Automatic "and"
Queries
By default, Google only returns pages that include all
of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between
terms. For example, to search for engineering product specification
documents, enter:
To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more
terms.
"OR" Searches
Google supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that
include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between
terms. For example, to search for an office in either London
or Paris, enter:
See Your Search
Terms in the Results
Every Google search result lists one or more excerpts from the web
page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the
excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly
determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.
Does Capitalization
Matter?
Google searches are not case sensitive. All letters,
regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower
case. For example, searches for "george washington," "George Washington," and "George washington" all
return the same results.
Does Google Use
Stemming?
To provide the most accurate results, Google does not
use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. Rather,
Google searches for exactly the words that you enter into
the search box.
For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline"
or "airlines.". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline" and
"airlines."
Refining Your
Search
Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of the
words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding
more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query
returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original
broad query.
Excluding
Words
You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus
sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to
exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus
sign.
For example, the search:
will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."
Phrase
Searches
You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks.
Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together
in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation
marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific
names.
Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like
quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join
your search words. For example, the search:
is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed
in double quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs,
and apostrophes as phrase connectors.
Restricted
Searches
You may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain
ways.
Restrict Type |
Query Syntax |
Example |
to a given location on your site |
allinurl; allintitle; inurl; intitle |
allinurl:google help see Advanced
Operators for details |
to specific domains |
site: |
site:google.com see Advanced
Operators for details |
to specific file types like Excel spreadsheets, PDFf
docs, etc. |
filetype: |
filetype:pdf |
Directory Restricting
To restrict the directories searched, enter a URL that drills down through
the directory structure to the directories or files to be searched. For
example, the query [google.com/manual/] restricts the search to
everything at the manual level. If the trailing slash is not included, as in
[google.com/manual], then all subdirectories are also
searched.
Advanced
Operators
Google Search supports several advanced operators, which are query
words with special functions. A list of the advanced operators with
explanation are provided below.
cache:
The search engine keeps the
text of the many documents it crawls available in a
backed-up format known as "cache." A cached version
of a web page can be retrieved if the original page
is unavailable (for example, the page's server is down).
The cached page appears exactly as it looked when the
crawler last crawled it and includes a message (at
the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached
version of the page.
The query [cache:] shows the cached version of the web page. For
instance, [cache:www.google.com] shows the cached page of Google's
homepage.
Note: There can be no space between cache: and the web
page URL in the query.
If you include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted
within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com press
releases] shows the cached content with the words "press" and
"releases" highlighted.
info:
The query [info:] returns all information
available for that particular URL. For instance,
[info:www.google.com] shows information about the Google homepage.
Note there can be no space between the info: and the web page URL.
site:
If you include [site:] in your query, the
results are restricted to those websites in the given domain. For instance,
[help site:www.google.com] finds pages about help within
www.google.com. [help site:com] finds pages about help
within .com URLs.
Note: There can be no space between the "site:" and the
domain.
link:
The query [link:] enables you to restrict your
search to all pages that link to the query page. To do this, use the
[link:sampledomain.com] syntax in the search box. (No other query
terms can be specified when using this special query term.)
For example, to find all links to Stanford's main page, enter:
allintitle:
If you start a query with [allintitle:],
the results are restricted to documents with all of the query words in the
document's HTML title. For example, [allintitle: google search] only
returns documents that have both "google" and "search" in
the HTML title.
intitle:
If you include [intitle:] in your query, the
search is restricted to results with documents containing that word in the
HTML title. For example, [intitle:google search] returns
documents that mention the word "google" in their HTML title, and mention the word
"search" anywhere in the document either in the title or
anywhere else in the document.
Note: There can be no space between the "intitle:" and
the following word.
Putting [intitle:] in front of every word in your query is
equivalent to putting [allintitle:] at the front of your query. For
example, [intitle:google intitle:search] is the same as
[allintitle: google search].
allinurl:
If you start a query with [allinurl:], the
search is restricted to results with all of the query words in the URL. For
example, [allinurl: google search] returns only
documents that have both "google" and "search" in the
URL.
Note: [allinurl:] works on words, not URL components. In
particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, [allinurl: foo/bar] restricts
the results to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in
the URL, but doesn't require that they be separated by
a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent, or that
they be in that particular word order. There is currently
no way to enforce these constraints.
inurl:
If you include [inurl:] in your query, the
results are restricted to documents containing that word in the URL. For
example, [inurl:google search] returns documents
that mention the word "google" in their URL and mention the word "search" anywhere
in the document either in the URL or anywhere else in
the document.
Note: There can be no space between the "inurl:" and
the following word.
Note: [inurl:] works on words, not URL components. In
particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, in the query [google
inurl:foo/bar], the inurl: operator affects
only the word "foo," which is the single word following
the inurl: operator, and
does not affect the word "bar." The query [google inurl:foo
inurl:bar] can be used to require both "foo" and "bar" to
be in the URL.
Putting [inurl:] in front of every word in your query is
equivalent to putting [allinurl:] at the front of your query. For
example, [inurl:google inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl:
google search].
© 2002 Google, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
Updated 2008-07-25
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