Quickstart Guide to Becoming a Google Searchbox Ninja

[Key Gear 6,663]

Introduction

 

In this guide, I would like to share some relatively basic tips and tricks that will increase your ability to find things using Google. If you walk through this guide from the beginning to the end, then you will know enough about Google searching to call yourself a beginner-level Searchbox Ninja.

 

Note, If you are an advanced user, then you may want to skip the Basic Techniques section and move down to the Advanced Techniques.

 

This guide was inspired by Ezynell's post yesterday where he noted that Google can be very useful for finding things on this site. After reading his post, I decided that maybe I could help out a bit by sharing some of the things that I have learned about Googling.

 

This guide was typed in a bit of a caffeine rush, so there will probably be many errors throughout. If you spot any errors while reading through, then feel free to let me know and I will fix them. If you have any other questions or comments then please feel free to post in this thread, and I will answer them as quickly as I possibly can.

 

Finally, I hope that some will find this guide useful. I learned basically everything here when I was trying to hunt down sources for academic papers. If you ever need to hunt down sources online, then try to keep some of these tricks in mind. When you need them, you will be very happy that you know them.

 

Some Definitions

 

Before we continue, I would like to provide some basic definition for a couple of things just to make sure that we are all on the same page:

 

URL - the URL of a page is just "address".

Domain - the domain of a page is just all of the stuff before the first "/" in a URL

Query - your query is just whatever it is that you type in Google's search box

Operators - special symbols and phrases that you can use to control your search query

 

Please keep in mind that these definitions are not supposed to be technical. They are only provided so that *everyone* can find this guide useful regardless of their technical background.

 

Don't Take the Numbers Too Seriously

 

At several points in this guide, I will mention the number of search results that appear for a specific query. Remember that these numbers are extremely rough estimates and they should never be used to come to any exact conclusions.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google is constantly combing through this site on a daily basis. This means that the pages and the number of results may not always be up to date.

 

Basic Techniques

 

In this section, I will be covering some basic techniques. If you are already familiar with these techniques, then you should skip to the advanced techniques section further down.

 

Searching a Specific Domain

 

 

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Sometimes, it may be useful to narrow your search down to just a single site. You can do this by telling Google the specific domain that you want to focus on.

 

The "site:" operator is what you need in order to do this. To use it, just type "site:" and then the domain that you would like to focus your search on.

 

For example, to narrow your search to only the pages on MLP Forums, then you would want to type this into the Google search box:

 

site:mlpforums.com

Click here to see what you would get as a result. As you can see, you now only see pages that begin with mlpforums.com. The "site:" operator also has the added benefit of returning a rough estimate of the number of pages on a site. MLP Forums seems to have approximately 89,200 pages of content. (Wow!)

 

 

 

 

Synonym Searching

 

 

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Have you ever wanted to do a search and include the synonyms of a specific word? While the Google search engine will try to do this automatically, you can use the "~" operator to require that a word's synonyms be included in your search.

 

For example, if you wanted to search for pages on this site that include the word "happy" and its synonyms, then you would type this into the Google search box:

 

site:mlpforums.com ~happy

Click here to see what you would get as a result. For fun, you can also click here to see what you would get when you search for the word "sad" and its synonyms. I get about 19,000 results for happiness and about 4,600 results for sadness. It seems that happiness is much more common in this forum. (As it should be!)

 

 

 

 

Searching for Phrases

 

 

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Searching for individual words is actually not always that useful. For example, if you wanted to find the pages on this site that contain the phrase Tom the Diamond, then you would probably type this:

 

site:mlpforums.com Tom the Diamond

Unfortunately, that search query is not very good because, on the very first page, you can see that this search query also includes "Tom Da Diamond" and maybe even "Tom Teh Diamond".

 

To perform a search for the real Tom, we need to get more specific. To do this, we can use the " operator. (Yeah, that's right. You just put the phrase in quotes.) This gives us the following query:

 

site:mlpforums.com "Tom the Diamond"

You can click here, to see the results of this query. You should see the real Tom the Diamond's profile right at the top of your search results. (All is well in the world.)

 

 

 

 

Searching By Subtracting Words You Don't Want

 

 

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Of course none of you would ever do this voluntarily, but, for the purposes of SCIENCE, let's go ahead and search for Trixie on MLP Forums. This is your search query:

 

site:mlpforums.com Trixie

Interesting. We have about 9,300 search results for Trixie. There is just on problem though. It seems like Tom the Diamond is practically everywhere that Trixie is mentioned. How can we find Trixie without Tom the Diamond?

 

We can use the "-" operator to only find pages that do not include a certain phrase or word. To fix our Trixie search, let's use the following search query:

 

site:mlpforums.com Trixie -"Tom the Diamond"

Ah, now our results look much nicer! Tom the Diamond is nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, this means that we seem to have lost a couple thousand search results. We went from 9,700 search results to only about 1,200 search results....

 

Hmm.... Tom the Diamond must really like Trixie.....

 

 

 

 

Advanced Techniques

 

In this section, I will be covering a few of the more advanced techniques. While some of you may already be familiar with quite a few of these, I hope that even advanced users will find something of interest within this guide.

 

Searching for a Range of Numbers

 

 

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Have you ever wanted to try searching a site for a number between two other numbers? If you have, then you would know that it can be painful to do this using normal Google search operators. You can use the ".." operator to find a number that is between two others.

 

For example, let's say that you wanted to find the Equestria Daily Nightly Roundups numbered 280 thru 290. Rather than entering the numbers one-by-one, you can just use the ".." operator and write your search query like this:

 

site:mlpforums.com "Nightly Roundup" 280..290

If you click here to see the results of this query, then you will see that Google actually found all of your Nightly Roundups with ease.

 

 

 

 

Requiring Words to Be in A URL: The Specific Way

Caution: This is a looong section.

 

 

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Do you remember earlier, in the basic techniques section, when I told you that the "site:" operator was good for looking at a domain? Well, you see..... I lied to you.

 

Actually, I didn't lie to you. But, I simply decided that

. I hope that you are not too broken up about this.

 

Anyway, the "site:" operator can actually be used for more than just searching within a specific domain. In fact, it can be used to search any path that exists under a domain as well.

 

A path is any of those "sections" of a URL that end with a forward slash. For example, on this site, status updates are found in the /statuses/ path.

 

Let's look at an example of using the "site:" operator to find a specific status. Let's say that you wanted to find all status updates where a user has used the phrase "Trixie is best pony". To do this, our search query would look like so:

 

site:mlpforums.com/statuses/ "Trixie is best pony"

Do you see what I did there? I simply added the /statuses/ path to the end of the domain. And, just like that, Google returns a list of statuses that include our phrase.

 

Before we go any further, I want to show you something that should horrify you. Remember what I said about the numbers being estimates? Note the number of results on that page. Now, scroll down to the bottom of that result page and click the very last number. Now... Look at the number of results. It is different. THE CAKE IS A LIE.

 

Moving right along now... Let's say that we want to know how many of these status updates are from Tom the Diamond. So, we can change the search query to the following:

 

site:mlpforums.com/statuses/ "Trixie is best pony" "Tom the Diamond"

Well, I think that these results are almost perfect, but I see that entire pages full of status updates are included. Those pages of status updates are messing up the results because I just want to look at the individual status updates - not entire pages.

 

To get this result, you have to do a little sleuthing. If we visit mlpforums.com in the web browser, look at a user's profile page, and then we click into their profile feed then we can see their status updates. You can click the date below a status update to bring up that specific status update.

 

Now that you are viewing a single status update, look at the url bar. Hmm, it seems that all of the individual status updates can be accessed via a single specific path - /statuses/id/. So, let's search this path using the following query:

 

site:mlpforums.com/statuses/id/ "Trixie is best pony" "Tom the Diamond"

Voila, now we can see the exact status updates that Tom the Diamond has posted proclaiming Trixie to be best pony.... What! Only 4.... For shame, Tom... For shame....

 

How can someone be an advocate of Trixie with only 4 status updates proclaiming her to be best pony? This is absolutely scandalous....

!

 

(You need at least 5 status updates declaring Trixie to be best pony if you are to qualify as a true Trixie advocate.)

 

 

 

 

Requiring Words to Be in A URL: The General Way

 

 

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Basically, everything that you can do using the "site:" operator can also be duplicated by using the "inurl:" operator.

 

For example, we can take our last search query from the previous section and we can change it to using "inurl:" as follows:

 

site:mlpforums.com "Trixie is best pony" "Tom the Diamond" inurl:/statuses/id/

As you can see, this gives us the same exact results as just using the "site:" parameter to specify the precise path to search. The "inurl:" operator does exactly what it says. It makes sure that whatever you supply is included in the url of all of your search results.

 

The "inurl:" operator is especially useful because sometimes you need something to be in a url but that thing is not necessarily a path. I would provide an example, but I am running out of caffeine-powered enthusiasm for this project and I need to get to the end ASAP.

 

 

 

 

Requiring Words to Be in A Title

 

 

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If you would like to have Google search for a specific word in the title of a page, then you can use the "intitle:" operator.

 

For example, let's say that we wanted to find all of the topics that had the word "brony" in their titles. We could use the following search query for that:

 

site:mlpforums.com inurl:/topic/ intitle:brony

Looking at our results, you can see that this search query actually does give us all of the topics that include the word Brony in their titles.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

And that was how Equestria was made. Actually.. No it wasn't, but I just felt like saying that.

 

Seriously though, I hope that this guide has been helpful to some of you out there. I do not actually think that you need to know all of this to search for things in MLP Forums. However, if you really want to use Google to its full potential, then these are the absolute minimum things that you must know.

 

If you read through all of this, then, congratulations. You are now a Searchbox Ninja.

 

For More Information

 

In this guide, I have tried to focus on the information that I have found to be the most useful and intuitive. Because of my focus, I left quite a bit of information completely untouched.

 

If you would like to explore more on this topic, then click here to visit the Google Guide. This site is a reference guide that includes information on basically all of the Google operators and everything that you would ever want to know about Google's search engine.

 

Usage Rights & Stuff Like That

 

If you repost this guide either online or offline, then you should probably cite this thread on this forum as its origin. I don't particularly care, but I think that this is only fair (rhyming is unintentional).

 

Assuming that proper citation is included as per the previous paragraph, you are free to use and modify this post as you see fit.

[FLARE 952]

  On 2012-04-15 at 10:05 PM, 'Scootacool' said:

 

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Of course none of you would ever do this voluntarily, but, for the purposes of SCIENCE, let's go ahead and search for Trixie on MLP Forums. This is your search query:

 

site:mlpforums.com Trixie

Interesting. We have about 9,300 search results for Trixie. There is just on problem though. It seems like Tom the Diamond is practically everywhere that Trixie is mentioned. How can we find Trixie without Tom the Diamond?

 

We can use the "-" operator to only find pages that do not include a certain phrase or word. To fix our Trixie search, let's use the following search query:

 

site:mlpforums.com Trixie -"Tom the Diamond"

Ah, now our results look much nicer! Tom the Diamond is nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, this means that we seem to have lost a couple thousand search results. We went from 9,700 search results to only about 1,200 search results....

 

Hmm.... Tom the Diamond must really like Trixie.....

 

 

 

 

hahaha!

 

That is a good guide, I knew a few of the techniques but I forgot them...

 

I'll be sure to use them next time I use google, however I occasionally use other search engines, such as Duck Duck Go.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Flare^99999999999

[Doctor XFizzle 8,670]

Nicely done and very informative. Thanks for putting it all together.

 

Although I do question the content of your examples. Surely you could have picked a better user

[Ashbad 969]

Lesson Zero of using Google is knowing how to use text boxes... and buttons... and using them with your keyboard and mouse!

 

Nice lesson, I'm afraid while I know a decent chunk of what you talked about here, I need to improve my Google-fu some, and this is perfect for that.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Ashbad

[Parties like Pinkie 385]

this helped me so much!! thank you a lot!!

 

 

 

eh, not really, I'm not a technical person, so i got lost at the first spoiler D:

 

 

Don't get me wrong, I like the way you're handling it, its just I'm really really really really REALLY technology intolerant :3

[Key Gear 6,663]

  On 2012-04-15 at 10:16 PM, 'Flare^99999999999' said:

I'll be sure to use them next time I use google, however I occasionally use other search engines, such as Duck Duck Go.

 

Another DuckDuckGo user? Nice! I use it quite a bit as well.

 

I am still not quite used to its way of searching though, so I have to fallback on Google quite a few times.

 

 

  On 2012-04-15 at 10:19 PM, 'Doctor XFizzle' said:

Nicely done and very informative. Thanks for putting it all together.

 

Although I do question the content of your examples. Surely you could have picked a better user

 

Thank you, and you're welcome XFizzle!

 

Actually, I only chose Tom the Diamond because he has such a "concentrated" personality. His username has an interesting dynamic with Trixie in the search results. I thought that it would lead to some interesting findings.

 

 

  On 2012-04-15 at 10:55 PM, 'Ashbad' said:

Lesson Zero of using Google is knowing how to use text boxes... and buttons... and using them with your keyboard and mouse!

 

Nice lesson, I'm afraid while I know a decent chunk of what you talked about here, I need to improve my Google-fu some, and this is perfect for that.

 

That is true isn't it. If someone is completely unfamiliar with Google, then they would, indeed, have to start with the basics.

 

I am happy that I was able to supply you with a useful resource. I'm going to be honest with you though, I actually forget these things all of the time. I had a moment of lucidity thanks to Ezynell's post yesterday though, and, this morning, I decided to write everything down so I wouldn't forget them.

 

After I saw how the writing was going, I decided that I would tweak my own examples to make them related to MLP Forums then I would post the finished result. I owed the creation of this to a post here, so it only seemed right to share the finished product.

[FLARE 952]

  On 2012-04-16 at 1:50 AM, 'Scootacool' said:

Another DuckDuckGo user? Nice! I use it quite a bit as well.

 

I am still not quite used to its way of searching though, so I have to fallback on Google quite a few times.

 

Yeah, I have to do that as well, but when I do all I need to type is !g somewhere in the search and it redirects you to google...but I'm sure you know this already.

[Key Gear 6,663]

  On 2012-04-16 at 2:23 AM, 'Flare^99999999999' said:

Yeah, I have to do that as well, but when I do all I need to type is !g somewhere in the search and it redirects you to google...but I'm sure you know this already.

 

Yeah, I know about the !g. I love DDG actually because I like their stance on privacy, but if I'm redirected to Google then it is just like I am still using Google for all of my searches.

 

I wish they would just implement the missing features themselves. I respect how much work they've put into the DuckDuckGo experience though. But, I am one of those horrible, impatient users that wants all the features and wants them now.