There will be a time in ones life when one has to search something on google and wondered only if I could have some more functionality to refine my search. Well there is but for those who seek, will find it.
Google is a very powerfull tool for the ones who know how to use it. I myself was unaware of some of theses and got to know it when I was presented with a problem.
The operators
Minus -
Consider a situation where you are trying to search for best laptop but you are not interested in Apple products so instead of searching best laptops you can search best laptops -apple and you will only be presented with the best of windows laptops.
Quotations ""
This is particularly useful when you want to preserve the oder of the search. Results of "heavy off road vehicals" will be different from heavy off road vehicals. This technique is refered to as Exact Search
Search a single website.
There are ocassions when we just want to find a particular thing on a single website. Consider during Black Friday you want to search amazon.com and not some other shaddy website which is offering a brand new iPhone for very cheap. Hence, if we want to search a product only on amazon then we can do something like this iPhone site:amazon.com. This will ensure that your search will be performed on amazon and you wont be shown or at least the first results will be from amazon.
Search for page title or on page title
Germany intitle =BMW and it will return sites that are about germany and have a title BMW in it. Also, there is allintitle =<words> which can be used for multiple words.
Search in URLs
Similar to the above one, you can search for words if they appear in the URL with inurl:<words> and allinurl:<words>
Search Text on a site
If you want to search for some text phrases on a website then you can do this by intext:<word> and allintext:<words>.
Search for file types
If you want to search for downloadable files, you can do it by filetype:<pdf/txt...etc>. Example: ISO 9001 filetype:pdf
Related website
This has happened to all of us. We like a website and we want to see what other options are available to us. In that case we can use related:<known website of interest>. Example: related:distrowatch.org
Placeholders
This has to be one of the most interesting one of all. Did it ever happen to you that you forgot a few words of a lyric or a quote or a film dialoge? You can search google with a placeholder just for this purpose. Example: Life is like a * *, you never know what you are gonna get. The * are refered as palceholders. You place it at either side of the forgotten words or phrases and you are pretty much done.
Time restrictions
This filter is particularly useful when you want to restrict information before or after certiain time period. Particularly useful in case of news articles. To use this option Tools > Any time and then select anytime that one wants.
There are a lot of other interesting things you can do with google. For more on this please check reference.
References: Hubspot UKpcMagazine