Best Tricks to Tweak Google Search

We all have been using Google for many years to search any or everything on the web. Probably is the home page for many of us from where we start our day. However, not many people know that Google is not just a simple search engine but an intelligent search engine i.e. you can do a lot more than a normal plain simple search. I am going to explain below some of such tricks which if you use with Google search commands, then Google search engine becomes a full fledged application.


Google as a Definition Dictionary

Turn your Google search engine into definition dictionary and use it to define just any word. Command to find the definition of any word is define: followed by the word to be defined

Google for File Type Search

When we search for any phrase on Google, then it returns all types of results. But if you really need to filter search such that you want to see only the results which appear in a particular file type e.g. word doc, pdf, ppt etc, then you can do so with command filetype. For example, if you need to find all the word documents containing phrase “marketing tips”, then it will be as in the following image;

Similarly, you can replace the filetype with pdf, ppt, xls etc in the above example, depending upon which type of files you are looking for.

Search within a particular website

By default Google search gives results from all the existing domains or website for the searched phrase or string. But if you need to make your search specific to a particular website, then that can be done with site: operator as follows;

The above example, will search for the phrase 3 Idiots within the site Indiatimes.com.

Search within URLs

If you want to search for a phrase that appear within URL only, then it can be done by using “_” , “.” , “-” operators within search string as below;

Above search will try to find all the URLs that contain the string “blogging tips”.

Search Related Websites

Many times it do happen that you land up at a particular website and then want to find more similar to that site. One very common example, is to find the websites of your competitors.

In the above example, it will search for all the websites that are related to MakeMyTrip.com. Since, its a travel related website, you will find all other travel related websites in the search results.

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