Using advanced search operators in Google can yield some useful results
You can use symbols or additional words in Google searches to make your search results more precise.
These are called ‘search operators’ and are special additional parameters you can send to Google to refine your search.
| Search operator | Example | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| double quotes | “workload booklet” | Searches for the exact phrase |
| AND or OR |
|
|
| - (hyphen) | -consultation | A hyphen excludes words from search results, e.g. exclude results with consultation |
| site: | site:nasuwt.org.uk | Searches only the specified site |
| filetype: |
|
|
-
Don’t put spaces between the colon and a search term. A search for site:nasuwt.org.uk or filetype:html will work, but site: nasuwt.org.uk and filetype: html won’t.
-
Google usually ignores any punctuation that isn’t part of a search operator. For example, teachers’ pay with the apostrophe is the same as teachers pay without regardless of whether you’re using the double quotes operator.
-
These techniques can be combined to yield more precise results:
-
“independent school” site:nasuwt.org.uk filetype:pdf only returns results for pdfs called or containing the phrase ‘independent school’ on the NASUWT website
-
"independent school" site:nasuwt.org.uk filetype:html the same search, but this will find our web pages instead of pdfs
-
Google’s own advanced search page
Google provides their own advanced search form, which can be found at https://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search.
Other useful search tips can be found at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433.
Google does sometimes drop operators, one example being the tilde that was used to find synonyms.