Useful Google Commands / Operators

There are many instances where Google or Wikipedia has come to the aid where questions needed answering. Sometimes the answer appears right away within the first results; sometimes it takes time to sift through the returned pages and sometime we need to rephrase the question and try again.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog; a list of useful predefined commands or operators that you can use to easily find what you are looking for.

define:supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Attempts to return a definition of the word from various authority information sources such as Wikipedia

“match this phrase”
Quotation marks used to search for matching phrases, handy for when searching for terms where order is important

weather Sydney
Shows the weather in the location specified although not all locations are supported, the major cities and suburbs work ok. On a side note matches are not 100% accurate as some cities or suburbs that share the same name but are in different countries can show up.

movie:transformers
Shows a list of movie reviews with brief descriptions and options to click through to the full review on the review site.

And here are some commands that the SEO minded use often

site:wiliam.com.au
Lists the pages indexed in Google for that domain, useful to see an estimation of how many of your pages have been indexed in Google. Note: for more accurate numbers setting up a Google webmasters for your site is the way to go.

link:wiliam.com.au
Lists the pages that are linking to domain, useful for a rough idea of who is interested enough to link to your site. Again this is a rough estimation with mixed results on each search to stop savvy SEOs from reverse engineering and obtain the same links as their competitors.

Google's webmaster guru Matt Cutts explains the link: operator here

allintitle:web design sydney
Shows pages that only have the keywords specified in the page title, in the example above pages that only contain web, design and Sydney in no particular order. To apply order simply place quotation marks around the keywords during the query.

allinurl:website accessibility
Works the same way as the allintitle: operator only the keywords specified are matched to the URL instead of the page title.

Undoubtedly there will still questions that cannot be answered like “where did I put my keys?” and “where’s the remote control?”

Maybe in the future we can see Patrick:car keys come into play. C'mon Google