Google search tweaks

The Special Syntaxes

In addition to the basic AND, OR, and quoted strings, Google offers some rather extensive special syntaxes for honing your searches.

intitle: restricts your search to the titles of web pages. The variation, allintitle: finds pages wherein all the words specified make up the title of the web page. It’s probably best to avoid the allintitle: variation, because it doesn’t mix well with some of the other syntaxes.

intitle:”george bush”

allintitle:”money supply” economics

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

intext: searches only body text (i.e., ignores link text, URLs, and titles). There’s an allintext: variation, but again, this doesn’t play well with others. While its uses are limited, it’s perfect for finding query words that might be too common in URLs or link titles.

intext:”yahoo.com”

intext:html

inanchor: searches for text in a page’s link anchors. A link anchor is the descriptive text of a link. For example, the link anchor in the HTML code href=”http://www.oreilly.com>O’Reilly and Associates is “O’Reilly and Associates.”

inanchor:”tom peters”

For more syntax check in next post