The Special Syntaxes of Google
Jul 31st, 2008 by sherlock Hit :: 762
- site:
site: allows you to narrow your search by either a site or a top-level domain.
AltaVista, for example, has two syntaxes for this function (host: and domain:), but
Google has only the one.
site:loc.gov
site:thomas.loc.gov - link:
link: returns a list of pages linking to the specified URL. Enter
link:www.google.com and you’ll be returned a list of pages that link to Google.
Don’t worry about including the http:// bit; you don’t need it, and, indeed, Google
appears to ignore it even if you do put it in. link: works just as well with “deep”
URLs—http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/ for instance—as with top-level URLs such
as raelity.org. - inurl:
inurl: restricts your search to the URLs of web pages. This syntax tends to work well
for finding search and help pages, because they tend to be rather regular in composition.
An allinurl: variation finds all the words listed in a URL but doesn’t mix well with
some other special syntaxes.
inurl:help
allinurl:search help - filetype:
filetype: searches the suffixes or filename extensions. These are usually, but not
necessarily, different file types. I like to make this distinction, because searching for
filetype:htm and filetype:html will give you different result counts, even
though they’re the same file type. You can even search for different page generators, such
as ASP, PHP, CGI, and so forth—presuming the site isn’t hiding them behind redirection
and proxying. Google indexes several different Microsoft formats, including: PowerPoint
(PPT), Excel (XLS), and Word (DOC).
homeschooling filetype:pdf
“leading economic indicators” filetype:ppt