The Google 'Around' Function Search Trick
I wrote the Google Search Tricks blog post on my website and thought I'd share here as well - read on for some fantastic insights into Google search tips:
One very powerful, but undocumented, search tool, is the AROUND function. If you wanted to research Barack Obama's interactions with Australia, you could simply include both terms in a search, but you'd find thousands of articles in which these two terms may appear many paragraphs apart, and bear no relation to one another.
But if instead you search "obama" AROUND(10) "australia" then the first results will be one in which Obama appears within ten words of Australia. NOTE: for this to work, both search terms must be in quotes, AROUND must be capitalized, and the number must be in parentheses.
Ebay and Google - Using the negative sign to exclude results
(-) Knowing how and when to use the minus sign in a search query. i.e. search George Washington -gwu.edu. This also work with eBay e.g. iphone case -gel (to exclude all iphone cases made of gel)Using Other Characters in Search
~ before a word to search simultaneously for the synonyms of that word.(*) as a wildcard in quoted search strings to stand for one or many unknown words. "The * cat" will return things like The angry cat, the big brown cat...
(+) will ensure that a word is included in every search result. (per u/izerth, google got rid of the + operator, so now you have to put " around single words or use search tools->results->verbatim)
Quotes surrounding a phrase will ensure that exact phrase turns up.
Triple quotes """word""" will get you 'actual verbatim' and leave out what google thinks is relevant.
filetype: .whatever will make sure URLs have that extension at the end.
inurl: some.words_here will make sure whatever follows shows up in the URL. Good for refining your search by domain name.
intitle:word returns sites with 'word' in the title bar - also useful for index or mp4, mp3 / intitle:whatever will look for whatever to appear in the title bar of the page - for example try site:docs.google.com intitle:mp4
site:sitename.com will return only results from that site
Add 'forum' to the search to find others with the same question
Use Google Scholar- https://scholar.google.com/ to find only relevant articles from academics, case studies, etc. Great for medical as well.
Thanks to Reddit for these awesome tips!
