Do you want to narrow down your Google searches and obtain more relevant and specific results? If yes, then you may want to take advantage of the Google basic search operators.
In case you didn’t know, these operators are fundamental words or characters that help in narrowing searches to a more specific result. In simple words, they provide effective ways to look for specific information and products over the Internet.
However, if you’re not familiar with the different basic search operators, then you’ve just visited the right place. In this article, we have put together a list of them to help you in searching better.
Google Basic Search Operators
1. AND :
For this operator, Google will look for results that are related to all or both terms that you have entered in the search box. Most of the time, the algorithm of Google will estimate correctly whether it is several separate words or phrase search, which makes the AND operator generally unnecessary.
- Example: content AND SEO
2. (hyphen) :
This basic search operator will help you in excluding terms from the search queries. For instance, you can search for “fruits” but exclude “banana” if you don’t want to see any result about it.
Example: “fruits – banana – bananas”
3. * (Asterisk) :
This operator will tell Google to fill in the blanks. To understand it better, refer to the example below.
- Example: “Google * update is on * March 2020”. This search query may possibly mean the Google Panda update is on 1st March 2020.
4. Info:
With info: you will be able to obtain info about a certain web address including the page’s cached version, pages that link to the website, as well as similar pages.
- Example: info: moz.com. This will display all the information about moz.com
5. # (hashtag) :
If you are currently searching for the most popular hashtags for a trending topic you can use the basic search operator #.
- Example: #valentinesday will show you the list of people who are using the hashtags.
6. $ :
This basic search operator is ideal for looking for items by price.
Example: Acer Laptop $400 will show the products in the $400 range
7. Cache :
This will return the most recent cached version of a certain web page. In other words, it will show how a page looks like the last time Google visited it.
- Example: cache: abc.com will display what Google sees when visiting abc.com
8. OR :
Google will look for web pages that may be using one of the many words you entered.
Example: Content marketing OR Digital Marketing will give results that are related to content marketing or digital marketing.
Conclusion
There you have it the eight basic search operators that can help you to search better and obtain accurate results more rapidly.
As you can see, using such operators is pretty easy. So what are you waiting for? Start using them today to make your job a bit easier when searching.