Chapter 2Advanced Operators

Introduction

Beyond the basic searching techniques explored in the previous chapter, Google offers special terms known as advanced operators to help you perform more advanced queries. These operators, used properly can help you get to exactly the information you’re looking for without spending too much time poring over page after page of search results. When advanced operators are not provided in a query, Google will locate your search terms in any area of the Web page, including the title, the text, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or the like. We take a look at the following advanced operators in this chapter:

•    intitle, allintitle
•    inurl, allinurl
•    filetype
•    allintext
•    site
•    link
•    inanchor
•    daterange
•    cache
•    info
•    related
•    phonebook
•    rphonebook
•    bphonebook
•    author
•    group
•    msgid
•    insubject
•    stocks
•    define

Operator Syntax

Advanced operators are additions to a query designed to narrow down the search results. Although they re relatively easy to use, they have a fairly rigid syntax that must be followed. The basic syntax of an advanced operator is operator:search_term. When using advanced operators, keep in mind the following:

•    There is no space between the operator, the colon, and the search term. Violating this syntax can produce undesired results and will keep Google from understanding what it is you’re trying to do. In most cases, Google will treat a syntactically bad advanced operator as just another search term. For example, providing the advanced operator intitle without a following colon and search term will cause Google to return pages that contain the word intitle.
•    The search term portion of an operator search follows the syntax discussed in the previous chapter. For example, a search term can be a single word or a phrase surrounded by quotes. If you use a phrase, just make sure there are no spaces between the operator, the colon, and the first quote of the phrase.
•    Boolean operators and special characters (such as OR and +) can still be applied to advanced operator queries, but be sure they don’t get in the way of the separating colon.
•    Advanced operators can be combined in a single query as long as you honor both the basic Google query syntax as well as the advanced operator syntax. Some advanced operators combine better than others, and some simply cannot be combined. We will take a look at these limitations later in this chapter.
•    The ALL operators (the operators beginning with the word ALL) are oddballs. They are generally used once per query and cannot be mixed with other operators.

Examples of valid queries that use advanced operators include these:

•    intitle: Google This query will return pages that have the word Google in their title.
•    intitle: “index of” This query will return pages that have the phrase index of in their title. Remember from the previous chapter that this query could also be given as intitle:index.of, since the period serves as any character. This technique also makes it easy to supply a phrase without having to type the spaces and the quotation marks around the phrase.
•    intitle: “index of” private This query will return pages that have the phrase index of in their title and also have the word private anywhere in the page, including in the URL, the title, the text, and so on. Notice that intitle only applies to the phrase index of and not the word private, since the first unquoted space follows the phrase index of. Google interprets that space as the end of your advanced operator search term and continues processing the rest of the query.
•    intitle: “index of” “backup files” This query will return pages that have the phrase index of in their title and the phrase backup files anywhere in the page, including the URL, the title, the text, and so on. Again, notice that intitle only applies to the phrase index of.

Troubleshooting Your Syntax

Before we jump head first into the advanced operators, let’s talk about troubleshooting the inevitable syntax errors you’ll run into when using these operators. Google is kind enough to tell you when you’ve made a mistake, as shown in Figure 2.1.

In this example, we tried to give Google an invalid option to the as_qdr variable in the URL. (The correct syntax would be as_qdr=m3, as we’ll see in a moment.) Google’s search result page listed right at the top that there was some sort of problem. These messages are often the key to unraveling errors in either your query string or your URL, so keep an eye on the top of the results page. We’ve found that it’s easy to overlook this spot on the results page, since we normally scroll past it to get down to the results.

Sometimes, however, Google is less helpful, returning a blank results page with no error text, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Fortunately, this type of problem is easy to resolve once you understand what’s going on. In this case, we simply abused the allintitle operator. Most of the operators that begin with all do not mix well with other operators, like the inurl operator we provided. This search got Google all confused, and it coughed up a blank page.

Introducing Google’s Advanced Operators

Google’s advanced operators are very versatile, but not all operators can be used everywhere, as we saw in the previous example. Some operators can only be used in performing a Web search, and others can only be used in a Groups search. Refer to Table 2.3, which lists these distinctions. If you have trouble remembering these rules, keep an eye on the results line near the top of the page. If Google picks up on your bad syntax, an error message will be displayed, letting you know what you did wrong. Sometimes, however, Google will not pick up on your bad form and will try to perform the search anyway. If this happens, keep an eye on the search results page, specifically the words Google shows in bold within the search results. These are the words Google interpreted as your search terms. If you see the word intitle in bold, for example, you’ve probably made a mistake using the intitle operator.

Intitle and Allintitle: Search Within the Title of a Page

From a technical standpoint, the title of a page can be described as the text that is found within the TITLE tags of a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document. The title is displayed at the top of most browsers when viewing a page, as shown in Figure 2.3. In the context of Google groups, intitle will find the term in the title of the message post.

As shown in Figure 2.3, the title of the Web page is “Syngress Publishing.” It is important to realize that some Web browsers will insert text into the title of a Web page, under certain circumstances. For example, consider the same page shown in Figure 2.4, this time captured before the page is actually finished loading.

This time, the...