Now that you understand the basics of Broad, Phrase and Exact match, it is time to learn a little more about some of the basic search operators or Google codes that you can use to refine your search query a little more.
Basic Google Search Codes or Operators:
- (hyphen): Using a hyphen when doing a search can be very helpful if there is more than one way to use a word. For example, the word backlinks is also often typed as back links or back-links in many articles and websites. If you just type in backlinks in the search field, you will only receive the sites using this spelling. Similarly, if you type in back links, you will only get results from pages using this spelling. But, if you type in back-links, it will return sites using all three variations of the word.
~(tilde): The Tilde is a very useful operator. This is also known as the synonym code. When you use this, you will get the results of your keyword, but also the results of other synonyms. So if I typed in Seattle ~house, I would also get results for Seattle home, Seattle residence and Seattle domicile.
+(plus): When you are doing a compound word search and one word in particular is important, you can add a plus sign in front of the key word. For example, Let’s take that search string above and add one more operator to is. Now type in Seattle ~house +downtown. Now the search results would show us results about any Seattle homes but only if they are downtown.
| (pipe): The operator for “or” is the word OR (must be capitalized) or you can use the | mark. This is used if you want results for multiple words. For example, You could be looking for shoes and you might be interested in various colors. So you would type the search like this: brown|black|grey +shoes. You could also type it as: brown OR black OR grey +shoes. Both would deliver the same results. The search engine will look for shoes in any of the colors you have specified.
-(minus): Although the hyphen is used to join two words as described above, it can also be used as a minus to remove negative words from your search query. So lets say you wanted those shoes, but you did not want them to be suede. You could type the search as brown|black|grey +shoes -suede. This would tell the search engines you wanted results on all of those colors of shoes but none in suede.
*(asterisk): You can use the asterisk in your search as a kind of fill in the blank. Let’s say you want to search for something, but you forget what the full phrase is. You could type “One fish two fish * * blue fish” in the search query and Google would automatically fill in the blanks and send you the results for One fish two fish red fish blue fish.
More Google Tutorials:
Google Search- What Is Broad, Phrase and Exact Match Search?
Google Search – Advanced Search Strings Tutorial
