Google Search Tips (Ultimate Google Guide)

I found the below article today and thought it really belonged in our Crabby Member Resources section. These search operators will be useful whether you are shopping, selling, researching keywords, looking for information, etc. Enjoy!!

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The Ultimate Google Guide can help you to improve your search results and SERP analysis with less-known search Tips.

First Things First

In this Google guide I’ll show you some less-known google operators and search tips. Please note that since this advanced operators are sometimes used by spam-bot, black hat seos and other people google does not loves, you may bump in 403-Access denied screens like the one I showed to you in my Google hates Doughnuts (and Advanced Search Strings) article.
Don’t be scared if this happens, nothing is wrong with you / your pc / your search, is just google that it’s a little nervous. karen wink

Things to Know

*google is not case sensitive: searching for doughnut is the same as DoughNuT

*search operators are case sensitive: searching for doughnuts OR donuts uses OR as the google operator, while doughnuts or donuts does not.

*google default is to search for pages that include all of your search terms. Also the order of your search term is somehow relevant.

*google excludes common words (also called stop words) like “I” , “the” etc.

*some operators can be combined, while others must be used alone.

Basic Operators

+
forces words to be included in search results. Useful with stop words that otherwise will be discarded

-prevents a search term to show in results, for example searching for doughnut -cream can help you to avoid creamy doughnuts

OR
returns documents with one of the given terms, like doughnut OR donut. You can also use | instead of OR: doughnut | donut

” “
using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase (including stop words), try “doughnut at midnight” and doughnut at midnight (actually, using quotes is similar, but not equals, to doughnut-at-midnight … it would be interesting to know what is the exact difference in SERP)

~
allow to search also for synonyms of the given word. searching for doughnut ~tips finds also pages with the word help or guide etc.

*
means every word. try “doughnuts with *”

..
Used to search in a range of numbers, “2..20 doughnuts” will find pages containing “I eat 3 doughnuts a day” and “I’ll never eat more than 15 doughnuts in a month”

This operators can be combined to create advanced queries, for example “I eat 1..100 doughnut OR doughnuts OR donut OR donuts each *”

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Those are the basic search tips shown in the Ultimate Google Guide. For the Advanced Google Operators and SEO Operators, Click here to read full article...