What are search operators and how to use them?

Posted by Rankfrog Solutions on July 8th, 2019

They are special characters and commands (sometimes called “advanced operators”) that extend the capabilities of regular text searches in Any search engine. Now a time Search operator can be useful for everything from content research to technical SEO audits.

Site- This operators limits results to a specific website. So if we type in site:https://rankfrog.com, you will only see the pages from this domain that Google has indexed.

Quotation Marks (“ ”) - This operator is used to searches for an exact phrase match. For Example, if I do a regular search for Digital Marketing Course, you will see in the snippet that they reference many courses related to Digital Marketing .” so if we search “SEO Content writing company” in quotation marks, then it will filter out the results only for the particular queries. 

Cache - This operator helps to find out what the most recent cache of a specified webpage and is useful for identifying when a page was last crawled by google crawler. Like cache:yourwebsitename.com

Minus sign (-) - If we want to narrow down the search even more, then we can add (-in Bhopal) from Digital Marketing Training in Bhopal and it will bring our query by tens of thousands of results because it is excluding pages with the word “In Bhopal” in the copy.  

Plus sign (+) - It is totally opposite to minus sign, you can use a plus sign to add words that you want to be included in the search results. Like- “SEO Companies + in Bhopal.’’

Related- It is used to find out Find sites related to a given domain. It means you are in a situation where you need any results that have more than one website with similar content to a site you are familiar with, So to get out of this trouble use can use this operator. Like-“related:rankfrog.wordpress.com.”

Info - This operator helps you to find out the information related to the domain that you are searching for and help you identify things like pages with the domain text-on-page (not necessarily linked), similar on-site pages, and the website’s cache. Like-"info:yourdomainname.com"

OR - using the OR operator, you can search for something (Digital OR marketing) Company. By wrapping the first part in parentheses, we’re grouping them together. 

Think about it as doing two separate Google searches- one for digital marketing and second for a digital marketing company and then merging the results together while weeding out duplicates.

AND - It returns only the results related to Both A and B in your search query. 

If I type site:https://rankfrog.wordpress in the search bar, then you will see that it has a ton of results. Now this is obviously the way too many results to go through manually, so I will narrow it down to their blog by adding (/blog) to our query. Now there are some a more manageable amount of results for a quick scan. But having looked through their blog, I am pretty sure they use WordPress because WordPress is very easy. So what I can do is add /page to our query and we’re down to around 100 or more results, it is an actually bad thing. Another thing you can do is to do a “site.” search with an exact URL after you publish a new page or post. Like - https://rankcom/blog/hunk, if it gets index then it shows you result otherwise not.