Advanced Google Search Operators
You copy an operator from a list and Google returns nothing. No error, no clue. Half the time the command was retired years ago and the list never got updated. Every operator below is tagged with whether it still works.
Showing 33 of 33 operators.
"exact phrase"Exact match
Forces the words to appear together, in that order.
"example.com" annual reportWorth knowing: The single highest-value operator and the most underused. Without quotes Google is free to substitute synonyms and drop words it judges unimportant.
Works on: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo
-Exclude a term
Removes results containing the word that follows.
example.com pricing -jobsWorth knowing: No space between the dash and the word. A space turns it into an ordinary hyphen and the filter silently does nothing.
Works on: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo
OREither term
Matches results containing one term or the other.
site:example.com OR site:example.orgWorth knowing: Must be capitals. Lowercase "or" is treated as a normal search word, which quietly breaks the query rather than erroring.
Works on: Google, Bing
|OR shorthand
Pipe character, identical in effect to OR.
site:example.com (pdf | docx)Worth knowing: Handy inside grouped expressions where repeated OR gets hard to read.
Works on: Google
( )Grouping
Groups terms so an operator applies to all of them.
site:example.com (login | signin | admin)Worth knowing: Without brackets, OR binds to the nearest term only. This is the reason multi-term queries return far less than expected.
Works on: Google
*Wildcard
Stands in for one or more unknown words inside a quoted phrase.
"how to * a website"Worth knowing: Only useful inside quotes. Outside them Google ignores it entirely.
Works on: Google
AROUND(n)Proximity
Matches two terms appearing within n words of each other.
"example.com" AROUND(5) "data breach"Worth knowing: Google has never documented this and has never removed it either. It works today. We would not build a saved workflow on it.
Works on: Google
ANDRequire both
Requires both terms to appear.
example.com AND securityWorth knowing: Mostly redundant, because Google already treats spaces as AND. Worth typing only when mixing with OR, where precedence gets ambiguous.
Works on: Google, Bing
site:Restrict to a domain
Limits results to one domain, subdomain or URL path.
site:example.comWorth knowing: The only operator Google formally documents. The result count it shows is an estimate and disagrees with Search Console routinely — treat it as a yes/no on indexing, never as a number.
Works on: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo
inurl:Word in the URL
Matches pages whose URL contains the term.
site:example.com inurl:adminWorth knowing: Matches anywhere in the URL, including the domain itself. On a short domain that produces a lot of noise you did not ask for.
Works on: Google, Bing
allinurl:All words in the URL
Every following term must appear in the URL.
allinurl:example.com loginWorth knowing: Does not mix with other operators. Put it first and use it alone, or Google ignores the rest of the query.
Works on: Google
related:Similar sites
Once returned sites Google considered similar.
related:example.comWorth knowing: Google confirmed it stopped supporting this. It now returns ordinary results or nothing, which is why competitor-research guides built on it stopped working.
link:Pages linking to a URL
Was intended to list pages linking to a target.
link:example.comWorth knowing: Dead for years. It returns results, which is what makes it dangerous — people still cite the output as a backlink count and it means nothing.
cache:Cached copy
Opened Google’s stored copy of a page.
cache:example.comWorth knowing: Google removed this. Nearly every dork cheat sheet still lists it, which tells you how often those lists get checked.
info:Page information
Showed a summary panel about a specific URL.
info:example.comWorth knowing: Retired alongside the other diagnostic operators. Search Console covers what it used to tell you.
inanchor:Word in link text
Matches pages linked to using that anchor text.
inanchor:"example.com"Worth knowing: Never documented and increasingly unreliable. Results skew old. Use a real backlink tool if the answer matters.
Works on: Google
intitle:Word in the title
Matches pages whose title tag contains the term.
site:example.com intitle:reportWorth knowing: It reads the source title tag, not the title Google displays. Google rewrites displayed titles often, so a match can look wrong on screen and still be correct.
Works on: Google, Bing
allintitle:All words in the title
Every following term must appear in the title.
allintitle: example.com annual reportWorth knowing: Like allinurl:, it does not combine. Mixing it with site: usually means one of the two is quietly dropped.
Works on: Google
intext:Word in the body
Matches the term in the page body rather than title or URL.
site:example.com intext:"internal use only"Worth knowing: Google applies this loosely on single words. Wrap the value in quotes if you want it honoured strictly.
Works on: Google
allintext:All words in the body
Every following term must appear in the body text.
allintext: example.com confidential draftWorth knowing: Same non-combining caveat as the other allin- operators.
Works on: Google
~Synonym search
Once expanded a term to include synonyms.
~example.com guideWorth knowing: Removed. Google now does synonym expansion automatically, which is exactly why quoting terms matters more than it used to.
+Force inclusion
Forced a word to appear exactly as typed.
+example.comWorth knowing: Retired long ago. Quotation marks replaced it, and a stray plus in a query today is simply ignored.
filetype:Restrict to a file format
Returns only documents of the given format.
site:example.com filetype:pdfWorth knowing: Matches the format Google recorded at index time, not the extension in the URL. A PDF served without an extension still matches.
Works on: Google, Bing
ext:File extension
Behaves like filetype: in most cases.
site:example.com ext:logWorth knowing: Undocumented alias. In our experience it occasionally returns a slightly wider set, particularly for formats Google does not parse. Try both before deciding nothing exists.
Works on: Google
before:Published before a date
Limits results to content Google dates earlier than the value.
site:example.com before:2023-01-01Worth knowing: Google guesses publication dates and gets it wrong on undated pages. Useful for narrowing, unreliable as evidence of when something was published.
Works on: Google
after:Published after a date
Limits results to content Google dates later than the value.
site:example.com after:2025-01-01Worth knowing: Pairs with before: to bracket a window. Accepts YYYY-MM-DD or just a year.
Works on: Google
daterange:Julian date range
The older date filter, using Julian day numbers.
site:example.com daterange:2459580-2459945Worth knowing: Superseded by before: and after:. It still parses but honours the range inconsistently, so a query can look filtered when it is not.
Works on: Google
..Number range
Matches any number in the given range.
example.com revenue $10..50 millionWorth knowing: Works on prices, years and plain figures. Include the unit outside the range or Google matches numbers that mean something else entirely.
Works on: Google
define:Definition
Returns a dictionary definition panel.
define:reconnaissanceWorth knowing: An instant-answer trigger rather than a filter. It does not combine with anything else.
Works on: Google
weather:Weather
Shows a forecast panel for a place.
weather:manchesterWorth knowing: Same category as define: — a shortcut, not a search refinement.
Works on: Google
stocks:Share price
Returns a quote panel for a ticker symbol.
stocks:googlWorth knowing: Expects the ticker, not the company name. A company name usually falls back to ordinary results.
Works on: Google
map:Map results
Pushes results toward a map view.
map:example.comWorth knowing: Largely redundant now that Google surfaces maps on its own for location queries.
Works on: Google
source:Restrict to a news source
Limits Google News results to one publication.
climate source:reutersWorth knowing: Only meaningful inside Google News. On web search it degrades to a plain keyword.
Works on: Google News
How to read this google search operators list
Most operator guides share one flaw. They list commands without saying whether Google still honours them. So you copy something, run it, and get a page of results that ignore your filter entirely.
That failure is silent, which is what makes it expensive. A retired operator does not throw an error. Google drops it and runs the rest of your query as ordinary keywords. The results look plausible. They are answering a different question.
Every entry here carries a status tag. Green means Google documents it or the whole industry depends on it. Amber means it works but Google never documented it, so behaviour drifts without warning. Red means it is gone — 6 of them, and every one still appears in guides published this year.
Each card also carries a note about how that operator fails in practice, because knowing the syntax has never been the hard part.
Which deprecated google search operators still appear in old guides?
The retired list is short and remarkably persistent. cache: is the one people miss most — Google removed it, and there is no direct replacement for viewing a stored copy.
link: is more troubling, because it still returns results. People run it, count the output and report a backlink figure. That number has meant nothing for years. Use a real backlink tool if the answer matters.
related:, info:, the tilde synonym operator and the plus sign round it out. All four appear in competitor-research tutorials that were correct when written and have not been revisited since.
We tell clients to sanity-check any operator against a domain they know well before trusting a result set. If the filter is not visibly doing something, it is not working.
intitle vs allintitle — when does the difference bite?
The singular forms combine. The allin forms do not. That is the whole rule, and it catches almost everyone once.
Write site:example.com intitle:report and both constraints apply. Write site:example.com allintitle: report annual and the allintitle: claims every word after it, including anything you meant as a separate filter.
The same trap sits in allinurl: and allintext:. Our habit is simply to avoid the allin family. Repeating the singular form twice does the same job and keeps the query readable when you come back to it in a month.
Do these commands work outside Google?
Some travel, most do not. site:, quoted phrases and the minus exclusion behave consistently across Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Past those three, assume nothing.
Bing handles filetype: but ignores several Google-only refinements without complaint. DuckDuckGo passes some queries through to its upstream sources, which makes behaviour hard to predict. The engine column on each card records where we have seen it hold up.
If you are switching engines deliberately rather than by accident, the Google dork generator runs the same query against four of them from one dropdown, which makes the differences obvious quickly.
Building a google search commands cheat sheet you will actually reuse
Saved queries beat memorised operators. Nobody recalls the exact syntax under time pressure, and the queries worth keeping are the ones you have already proved return something useful.
Three worth saving on day one. A site: sweep of your own domain, so you notice when a section drops out of the index — the method is in how the site: operator behaves. A format filter for documents, covered in filetype: searches for documents. And an exclusion pattern for whatever noise your domain generates.
Security research goes further, layering operators into combinations that surface specific classes of file. Those patterns are collected in operator combinations used in security research, and the defensive version — the same queries pointed at a domain you own — lives in the self-audit query builder.
One honest limitation. Operators tell you what Google has indexed and nothing more. They cannot find an unindexed page, and they will not tell you why a page failed to rank. For that, a keyword density checker and your own analytics answer more than any query will.
Getting more out of advanced Google search operators
Start narrow and widen. One operator, verify it did something, then add the next. Most failed queries we see were over-specified from the first keystroke.
Quote anything that must match literally. Capitalise OR. Skip the allin family. Check the status tag before trusting a command from a list. Those four habits fix the overwhelming majority of queries that come back empty.
The reference above stays filterable and testable so you can prove any of this in about ten seconds against a domain you already understand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does an operator work for a colleague but return nothing for me?
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How many operators can I stack in one query?
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Why do allintitle: and allinurl: break the rest of my query?
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Does capitalisation matter anywhere?
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Do these operators work in Images, News or Scholar?
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Why do before: and after: return pages with obviously wrong dates?
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Do operators change the ranking or only the filter?
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Why does site: with a subfolder miss pages I know exist?
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Can I use Google operators in the browser address bar?
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How do I tell whether an operator has been retired?
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