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Monday, January 14, 2008

Google Search Regex


Well, they are not really the same regex as we can use on Linux or programming. But some of the “tags” are pretty good and can help you on a lot of searches.

I've organized them in a manner that I thought made the best sense. But the sites where I got the information from do have them in different others, as well as some other tags that I did not find as important. The links are at the end of the post.


Basic
- "+" - Result must contain word
- "-" - Result must not contain word
- "OR" and "|" - Applied between two words, it will find "this or that", or both. The "OR" operator must be uppercase and have a space between the 2 words on each side. The "|" operator does not need a space between the words
- " "" " - Finds an exact match of the word or phrase
- "~" - Looks for synonyms or similar items. Eg: "~run" will match runner's and marathon
- ".." - Indicates that there's a range between number. Eg: 100..200 or $100..$200
- "*" - Matches a word or more. Eg: "Advanced * Form" finds "Advanced Search Form"
- "word-word" - All forms (spelled, singe word, phrase and hyphenated

Important
- "site:" - Search only one website or domain. Eg: "PC site:wazem.org" will find PC within wazem.org
- "filetype:" or "ext:" - Search for docs in the file type. Eg: "Linux tutorial filetype:pdf" will find Linux tutorial in the pdf format
- "link:" - Find linked pages (pages that point to the URL)
- "define:" - Provides definition for a word or a phrase
- "cache:" - Display Google's cached version of a web page.
- "info:" - Info about a page
- "related:" - Websites related to the URL
- "allinurl:" - All words must be in the URL
- "allintitle:" - All words must be in the title of the page
- "intittle:" - Match words in the title of the page
- "source:" - News articles from a specific source

Calculations
- "+ - * /" - Normal math signs. Eg: 12 * 4 + 2 - 1 /2
- "% of" - Percentage. Eg:10% of 100
- "^" or "**" - Raise to a power
- units "in" units - Convert Units (currency, measurements, weight). Eg: 300 lbs in Kg, 40 in hex

Others
- "book" or "books" - Search books. Eg: book "LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell"

Links used:
GoogleGuide.com
GoogleGuide.com Advanced Operators
Wikipedia Regex

6 comments:

skan said...

http://www.google.com/codesearch

Anonymous said...

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Nathan Crock said...

Thank you Victor! I sent this to all my research colleagues. This will make us better researchers! Cheers.

Anonymous said...

Exact match doesn't work any more. Most 4 basic words strung together no longer match any documents on google. I know that a few years ago that wasn't the case. Google used to be the holy grail of searches, any thing you could dream of could be found there but that's no longer the case.

skan said...

Hello

How can I search a text cotaining the character "

for example 20" length

If I write it that way it thinks I'm starting a quotation.