Search Cheat Sheet

I began using Google before the word was a verb. It was a clean, no-fluff site that loaded quickly and shot out great results. Since the Yahoo page just kept getting more and more cluttered making it harder to navigate, Google was a good replacement.

Over the years Google has grown and now they are so powerful that they seem to be abusing that power in a number of situations. But that isn’t the point of this post. The point is, a lot of people still use Google. Even though I’ve been using a number of other search engines with excellent results, I still pull out the old G now and then. I also like to keep handy my Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet.

This Google Guide page is also available in pdf format, for those who want to download it. I just bookmark the page and check it out now and then. It’s a handy reference for things like the site: or link: operators. In fact, there are several there that you may not have seen before. The page was last updated in Sept. 2007 so it is being maintained. Good to know.

One very useful operator is the filetype: for searching for a specific type of file (ext: can also be used). I’ve often used allintext: for finding my specific keywords in the page, like when I searched for Mizuno golf but wanted to be sure I hit a page about that specific manufacturer.

Another operator that has come in handy is inurl: which turns up results where the query word is listed in the URL. Very helpful when you can’t remember a complete URL but just a part of it.

Go ahead and look over the page. Have you seen all these before? Anything new there? If you know of any sites related to other search engines, drop me a comment and tell me about it. I’m always interested in better ways to do things.