Google Speed Search Lesson #7 – Special Syntax

Here’s part seven of my Google Speed-Search series. This post looks at how you can use special syntax to finds results based on title, body text or url.

Searching only page titles

Let’s say you wanted to find profile pages for Michael Jackson. The most relevant will have “Michael Jackson profile” in the title, right? So, try searching with the intitle command:

intitle:"michael jackson profile"

This will only return web pages with that term in the title. If you are one of the few people actually looking for Osama Bin Laden, you might find him with this:

intitle:"osama bin laden location"

Searching through the body of a page

If you are looking for blog posts that recommend something better than Windows Vista, you can use the intext command to restrict your search to the body of each page:

intext:"better than Windows Vista"

That will return pages where the author has either suggested a superior alternative to the Windows operating system, or has decided that “there is nothing better than Windows Vista”

Searching through urls only

Sometimes it’s useful to search the urls of web pages to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to find the help page on Amazon.com, you might try using the inurl command.

inurl:help Amazon

This brings up all the help pages you could possibly need for the massive online “bookstore”. inurl has its uses, but for webmasters, you can’t beat the site command which I’ll be addressing next time.

Next: Lesson #8 – Site

If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!

3 thoughts on “Google Speed Search Lesson #7 – Special Syntax

  1. Mmmm this is an informative post and I shall be reviewing it in great detail. It’s pretty interesting how Google works and it’s great that you are doing these posts as it can help a webmaster with their search engine optimization. Google is king now, so if you want to have a webpage, you’ve got to know how it works!

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