Search Operators That Still Work

Search results have got noisier, but the tools for cutting through them are mostly unchanged. These are the operators worth committing to memory, and what each is actually useful for.

Quotation marks

"the exact words"

Forces an exact match instead of a helpful reinterpretation. This is the single most useful one, because modern search is aggressive about deciding what you meant. Use it for error messages, quotes, product names and anything where a synonym would be wrong.

site:

site:example.com refund policy

Restricts results to one domain. Frequently better than the site’s own search box, which is often worse than the search engine indexing it. Also works on a section: site:example.com/blog.

Minus

jaguar -car

Removes a term. The fix for a query where one dominant meaning is drowning out the one you want. Stack as many as you need.

filetype:

filetype:pdf annual report 2024

Finds the document rather than pages discussing the document. Very effective for manuals, specifications, research and anything an organisation published once and never linked prominently.

intitle: and inurl:

intitle:"changelog"

Matches the page title or the URL rather than the body. Useful for finding pages that are about a thing instead of pages that mention it in passing.

OR and grouping

(rss OR atom) feed reader

OR must be capitalised. Handy when a thing has two common names and you do not want to run the search twice.

Date filters

Not an operator, but the tools menu in most search engines lets you restrict results by time. Worth using constantly, in both directions: recent results for anything technical, older results for anything the current web has buried under listicles.

The ones that stopped being reliable

• +word to force inclusion. Superseded by quotation marks
• ~word for synonyms. Effectively what search does by default now
• The wildcard *. Still works occasionally, rarely predictably
• link: to find pages linking to a URL. Long retired on the major engines

How to combine them

The real gain comes from stacking. "error code 0x80070005" site:learn.microsoft.com will beat the same words typed plainly nearly every time, because you have removed both the paraphrasing and the content farms in one step.

Adding the name of a forum or community to a query is the other reliable trick when you want an answer from a person rather than a page written to rank.

For finding sites rather than answers, the discovery methods in this guide work better than any operator. More practical pieces in Guides.