Google Search User Help Software Version 3.4

Topics:

• The Basic Search
• Spelling
• Synonyms
• Automatic "and" Queries
• "OR" Searches
• See Your Search Terms in the Results
• Does Capitalization Matter?
• Does Google Observe Stop Words?
• Does Google Use Stemming?
• Refining Your Search
• Excluding Words
• Phrase Searches
• Restricted Searches
• Advanced Operators

To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant results.

Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages in which your query terms are near each other.

Note: Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted to HTML for indexing; however, the HTML is not displayed.

A single spelling suggestion is returned with the results for queries where the spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.

The spell checker feature is context sensitive. For example, if the query submitted is "gail divers," "gail devers" is suggested as an alternative query. However, "scuba divers" would not return an alternate query suggestion.

Note: Currently, the spell checker supports only US English.

Synonyms are other words that have the same or similar meanings. They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the results page.

By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. For example, to search for engineering product specification documents, enter:

To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.

Google supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example, to search for an office in either London or Paris, enter:

Every Google search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.

Google searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington," "George Washington," and "George washington" all return the same results.

Google ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles. Google automatically disregards such terms as "where" and "how," as well as certain single digits and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching. If you want to use stop words in your search, use the "+" sign or enclose your phrase containing stop words in quotation marks. Make sure that you include a space before the "+" sign.

For example, to search for Annual Report Version I:

You can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.

To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. Rather, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box.

For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline" or "airlines.". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline" and "airlines."

Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query.

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.

For example, the search:

will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search words. For example, the search:

is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.

You may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain ways.

Restrict Type	Query Syntax	Example
to a given location on your site	allinurl; allintitle; inurl; intitle	allinurl:google help see Advanced Operators for details
to specific domains	site:	site:google.com see Advanced Operators for details
to specific file types like excel spreadsheets, pdf docs, etc.	filetype:	filetype:pdf

Directory Restricting

To restrict the directories searched, enter a URL that drills down through the directory structure to the directories or files to be searched. For example, the query [google.com/manual/] restricts the search to everything at the manual level. If the trailing slash is not included, as in [google.com/manual], then all subdirectories are also searched.

Google Search supports several advanced operators, which are query words with special functions. A list of the advanced operators with explanation are provided below.

cache:

The search engine keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available in a backed-up format known as "cache." A cached version of a web page can be retrieved if the original page is unavailable (for example, the page's server is down). The cached page appears exactly as it looked when the crawler last crawled it and includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.

The query [cache:] shows the cached version of the web page. For instance, [cache:www.google.com] shows the cached page of Google's homepage.

Note: There can be no space between cache: and the web page URL in the query.

If you include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com press releases] shows the cached content with the words "press" and "releases" highlighted.

info:

The query [info:] returns all information available for that particular URL. For instance, [info:www.google.com] shows information about the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the info: and the web page URL.

site:

If you include [site:] in your query, the results are restricted to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] finds pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] finds pages about help within .com URLs .

Note: There can be no space between the "site:" and the domain.