How to Google like a pro

Noah Lloyd
2 min readFeb 6, 2022

Make your search more powerful and get the results you really want.

What are search operators?

A search operator is something you can add within your google search that filters content so that you can get precisely the results you’re looking for. They take a couple minutes to learn, but they’ll be useful for the rest of your life. I personally use them every day when I’m looking for something specific.

Google’s search operators from most useful to somewhat useful

“ ”

If you wrap a phrase or word in quotation marks, you only get results that have precisely that phrase or word within the website

“Noah Lloyd Medium”

-

Add a dash in front of a word to remove any site that contains that word from your results

What to watch -Netflix

site:

If you only want results from a specific website, you can add site: together with it’s domain to the end of your search

best online course for programming site:reddit.com

filetype:

Get results that are of a specific file. I mostly use this to find PDF’s

Sun Tzu on The Art of War filetype:pdf

define:

Put “define” in front of any word to get the definition, synonyms and part of speech of that word

define:zeal

intitle:

Gets any results that have the phrase or word you placed after in the title of the site

chrome extension intitle:spark dashboard

intext:

Works much the same as intitle, but instead of having to be in the title, the word or phrase you put in can be anywhere on the site

intext:noah lloyd

..

You can use two full stops to signify a time period by putting a year before and after

Top companies 2005..2010

Math

Google Search can do math. Put in an equation and you’ll get a calculator showing the result of your calculation

1 + 2² * 4

inurl:

You can get results based on parts of different websites’ url’s, or use it in the same way as “site:”

clothes inurl:shop

related:

Use related: and then a website to find other sites that have similar content to it

related:amazon.com

weather:

To get the weather of a specific location, or without any location and you’ll be shown the weather for where you are

weather:london

stocks:

If you put in stocks: and then a ticker, Google Finance will pop up with information on that stock

stocks:AAPL

Inposttitle

Search for a blog post that contains a word or phrase in the title

inposttitle:climate

Combining operators

In order to get more value from all the operators you can combine them in your searches

fiction -”harry potter” filetype:pdf intext:dragon

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