I am a Google search slut and mainly because of the advanced operators you can use to get very accurate results.
You can see on Google’s Advanced Search Operators official page a good list of them but there are many more that are really valuable.
The Date Param:
Recently Google added a date parameter I find this SOOOO useful. Matt Cutts wrote about it a while back but I will recap for those who missed it.
Lets say your a company and want to see how many times your brand was mentioned in the last week:
http://www.google.com/search?q=shoemoney&as_qdr=w
Breaking down the string q= what we are looking for and as_qdr= times to look for (d=day w=week m=month).
This also helps a lot with the issue of old results for new items… for example in searching for “pubcon las vegas” you get results from the beginning of time… very frustrating if your looking for last weeks event. But add the &as_qdr=w into your search and whola
Very useful! I hope Google adds this to the default search soon (like it is in blog search).
The OR command
Many times in searching I am looking for a possibility of several things. The OR command (all upper case) lets you do that easily.
For instance I could do 3 separate searches for my name with typos… like jeremy schoemaker then another search for jeremy shoemaker and another for jeremy schumacher or I could do them all with one string:
jeremy schoemaker OR shoemaker OR schumacher
or for super google ninjery you can use the | instead of OR….
Jeremy + schoemaker|shoemaker|schumacher
dig?
ZK @ Web Marketing Blog (23) 
Ricky Peterson (22) 
R Kumar (12) 
Holly Mann (11) 
Shanker Bakshi (9) 
Yisraeli Foods (8) 
Jacques Snyman | 3 Quotes (7) 
gurtey (7) 
Find Affiliate Offers (5) 
Michael Zhao (77) 
almir (76) 
fas (75) 
R Kumar (74) 
Rick Kats (70) 
Jay @ work from home (62) 
Dino (60) 
Dick (624) 
Goran Website (495) 
Melvin (330) 
Ben Pei (329) 
Taris Janitens (274) 
meethere (269) 
Tushar Dhoot (265) 
Tushar (260) 
Moneybites (259) 
nice informations . thanks for that
great post – I have used this a lot since i first read it
Thats many useful informations thanks, searching in google can be een more accurate using tips u wrote over. Thanks
thanks for the article. i dig advanced search. makes me feel like a nerd…
Nice one Shoe, I love the OR function but didn’t know about the Date Param thing – good stuff!
I think I’ll have to try this out. Never heard of it before
Let’s take it to the next level of slick. Use Auto Hot Key or similar macro application to append the less intuitive functions easily
e.g. typing ::day:: renders ‘&as_qdr=d’
Doesnt google have a massive list of these some where?
Wow, I’ve noticed BlogRush is back up or was it just down?
Great post, this is good for a lot people since Google does use OR and XOR expressions which can be hard to understand people who don’t take computer engineering in college.
You can also use the date operators together with a site:-query to check how current the indexing of your site is. If your site generally gets indexed quickly but shows nothing for the last week (or month), you’ll want to check your Webmaster Tools account to see if it shows any errors (eg your hoster might be blocking the Googlebot).
Oh, but you are, admit it. You can’t always be searching for serps
I’m no google search slut, but thats cuz I use the shoemoney Serp Tools baby!
Thanks for the lesson on the advanced search options. It’s good to be reminded that they exist.
It is just not nearly as cool when you have buttons for it.. Please!
Shoe,
If you use FF, you could build your own Custom Search. Just build a little search page on your site that appends the daily, weekly, or monthly variable to the querystring and forwards it to Google!
Doug
Nice! I didn’t know about the time search. Thanks for the tip!
and I previously thought I was a ninja
i always enjoyed google sets. it helps me remember words…
I agree, cool info.
I love google advanced searching
, saves time when looking for great things.
I’m there with you wishing it would be in their default search, or at worst they should make a webmaster search engine…with all cool features in the search that webmasters want!
That is a great info. thanks for the tips!
While in High School I competed in Science Olympiad and my best event was “Surfing the Net” because I utilized these advanced search functions which are rarely known of by many users.
yup using the ~ will find synonyms…
That is a great tip. I will definitely start using this today.
and dont forget num=xxx for the amount of results you want to show.
SURE you can sneak in num=0 if you want to prove to a client their SEO sucks cause they have no results listed. That’s some slime bag black hat tactics.
that’s good info. thanks for the tips!
90%+ people hardly use those functions. But advanced users love those. Thanks for the info.
It’s funny how such a simple concept can be so useful and nobody realizes its need until they are presented with it. Thanks for the info.
Some of the stuff you can do with these is crazy… only for the true ninjas
wow – this is very useful! good info shoe!
Thanks for the info. It’s always nice to learn these little tricks. I’m sure the OR is in Google search instructions somewhere, but I never take the time to read that.
One thing that would be nice is if they added a few more XXX: type paramaters. I often do searches on book titles and would love it if they had “Shop: XXX” where the results would only show stores with that title. I have a feeling that their searches will continue to get more and more refined over the years to come. I’m already amazed at how easily I find things compared to just a couple of years ago.
Shoe, you beat me to it. I love the google operators. I especially like the calculator function, as well as define. Somewhere I thought there was a synonym function also, but oh well.