How to perform advanced Google searches and expand your results

Even if you have already used Bing, Baidu or Yahoo a few times, they are probably not your default search engines, right?

Google is still the most used search engine by users. Now, do you know how to use advanced search in Google?

Some commands when inserted in the search box help the algorithm to find more specific results. Know the search commands in Google!

For example, it is possible that you find a news, article or a site that you have read before, but you have forgotten where, it can also be a content that you loved or a certain file format.

Follow this post and learn some “tricks” to get the most out of the huge Google database!

Specific Phrases

When we do a search on the Internet, the search engine gives us several results that contain the inserted ones.

However, they are not always displayed in the content specifically, and the search engine considers each one separately.

The result is that, in order to find any really interesting pages for your target, you will have to manually filter the results, going site by site to see if the content is relevant to your search.

Now, when using Google’s advanced search, you just have to put the search terms in quotes so that the engine will show you only the pages where the phrase is displayed exactly as it has been inserted.

In the images below, we use the example “virtual teaching”.

Observe in the first search – without the quotes -, how Google delivers more than 68 million results.

Already using the advanced search by specific term, that number drops to 273,000.

Specific word in the title

The same reasoning above can be used to filter the results already by the title.

In this way, it is possible to direct the search even more, since the searched keyword will be highlighted.

To do this, enter the commands allintitle or intitle followed by a colon and the search term.

Related sites

There is another command that can be used in Google’s advanced search that will come in handy: related (in Spanish: related).

As the name itself indicates, it helps us find sites that are similar or related to what you want.

This suggestion is very useful to discover new pages that deal with a topic of your interest or to find sites that have the same function.

It’s easy to use: put the related command followed by a colon and the address of the first site.

Document type

In an ocean of Google information, what is your target interested in: a PDF file or a DOC?

There is also a little secret to filter the results by file type.

The commands that are in fashion are filetype and ext — they both serve the same purpose.

You just have to place one of the two followed by a colon, the acronym for the type of document you are interested in (PDF, DOC, ZIP, PPT, XLS, etc.) and the search term.

Search with exclusion of terms

Now, let’s assume that you need rich content about how to lose weight in a healthy way, but whenever you do a search, Google gives you results with suggestions of miracle and restrictive diets that are definitely not what you are looking for.

Yes, it is possible to fix this!

There is a very interesting command that is used to exclude search terms. In other words, the engine will relate contents that have the words or phrases searched for, but that do not necessarily have the prohibited term.

Thus, it is much easier to direct searches.

Using our example above, just search for “weight loss”, but put a minus sign (-) followed by the unwanted term (diet).

More than one similar term or phrase

Another type of advanced search in Google is similar terms.

Instead of performing more than one search, always with a keyword, you can optimize the time and program the algorithm to deliver everything that interests you.

For example, instead of doing a search for “last Oscar winners” and then opening another tab for “2019 award-winning movies,” insert the two terms connected by the tilde (~) sign.

Pages that mention certain content

This suggestion is especially useful for those who want to know how the mentions of their content are doing.

If you put the link command followed by a colon and a keyword related to your site, you will find those who mentioned your page at some point, even videos.

Ad removal

If you’re doing an advanced search on Google and you don’t want results to come up in the form of ads, just insert the term -advertising at the end of the sentence.

The word in English means “advertising”, and the search engine understands what content with price and links for shopping carts are configured as.

So, the idea is the same as the remove terms command we talked about earlier: Google will return results that contain the searched term, however, it will remove options identified as advertising.

In the example, we use the search “create blog”.

Notice that in the first image, without the ad removal command, all the first pages found are marked as ads.

Already in the second search, using -advertising, although one or another ad may still appear, the results are more informative content.

final tip

Now that you know several interesting commands to refine your searches, we have one last suggestion: you can use the Google page, with various filters, to further optimize the search results.

The same goes for the. Incredible! Don’t you think?

Tell me, are these suggestions golden or not?

So, share this post on your social networks so that your friends can also find out how to find everything they need on Google!