With the help of Gary D. Price, MLIS, of The Resource Shelf, and a hand­ful of arti­cles, I put together a list of Cool Search Engine Tips:

• To cut down on results and search only on the page title, type: intitle:“Online jour­nal­ism”

• Find out who’s link­ing to your web site or blog, use Google like so: link:jdlasica.com/blog or AlltheWeb like this: link.all:jdlasica.com/blog. (AlltheWeb seems a bet­ter choice here.)

• Limit your search to a spe­cific site or server:

site:berkeley.edu “jd lasica”. (No space between the colon and the next word.) This lim­its your search to only Cal sites.

To search for Microsoft on the NY Times’ site, type: site:nytimes.com Microsoft

To search your name or a sub­ject lim­it­ing the search to only .edu sites, type in this syn­tax: “jd lasica” site:edu

• To limit your search to a spe­cific file type:

Use file­type: to limit searches to .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls files. For exam­ple, here’s how to look for men­tions of the phrase “lawrence lessig” in pow­er­point slides: “lawrence lessig” filetype:ppt

Or com­bine: “cal­i­for­nia” filetype:xls site:gov intitle:state to get spread­sheets from .gov sites that con­tain the word Cal­i­for­nia and have the word “state” in the title.

To search servers only in Canada: “jd lasica” site:ca

You could “not” out a few sites by using the minus sign. For exam­ple, to remove all blogspot and user­land blogs from a search you could do the fol­low­ing:
–site:blogspot.com –site:userland.com, etc.

Remem­ber Google only allows a max­i­mum of 10 terms in a search box. So if you would elim­i­nate 6 sites, you can only have 4 query terms. AlltheWeb.com, by con­trast, has no limits.

Caveats: It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that is good as Google is, it very likely doesn’t have every­thing. That’s why it’s always a good idea to use more than one engine. Also, site: does not work with Google News.

AltaVista allows trun­ca­tion searches. Type fudg* brownie recipe and the wild card will retrieve fudge brown­ies, fudgy brown­ies and fudge-nut brownie cake.

The wild card will also allow wild card word sub­sti­tu­tions, so Nes­tle * cook­ies turns up lots of results in AltaVista or Google.

AltaVista also allows prox­im­ity search­ing. Type sub­sti­tu­tion NEAR choco­late to find the word sub­sti­tu­tion near chocolate.

Type a url into AlltheWeb and you’ll get a list of all web pages and sites that link to it. For exam­ple, http://jdlasica.com/blog.

Other Google tricks:

• Googlism will find out what Google.com thinks of you or your friends. For instance: Doc Searls.

• Use Google as a U.S. tele­phone direc­tory. All you need to know is the person’s last name and state. Type phone­book: fol­lowed by the last name and two-letter state abbre­vi­a­tion in the Google search field. No space between colon and next word. For instance, phonebook:bread & choco­late va. (The search returns a max­i­mum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly com­mon, you’ll have to help it out by pro­vid­ing a city or a first name.)

If you type rphone­book:, you will get only res­i­den­tial list­ings. If you type bphone­book:, you’ll get only busi­ness list­ings. (Don’t leave out the colon in “phone­book:”.)

• Reverse direc­tory: You can use the phone book as a reverse direc­tory. Type phonebook:(area code) num­ber, and Google will (usu­ally) give you the name of the per­son or busi­ness who has that number.

• Dic­tio­nary. After you’ve done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an under­lined word, and Google will give you its def­i­n­i­tion. Another click acti­vates a thesaurus.

• Google Alert: Enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affil­i­ated with Google, auto­mat­i­cally runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.

• Google lists more search tricks here.

• You can find more Google tool tricks at Buz­ztool­box. [One tool lets you search busi­ness names by state, with the city optional.] Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yes­ter­day, in the last seven days or the last 30 days. (Unfor­tu­nately, index­ing and fresh­ness are only tan­gen­tially related, so “fresh” does not mean new.)

Another per­son who has invented tools for Google and put them online is Kevin Shay. One of his pro­grams lets you search Google for terms that are within one, two or three words of each other.

Also, see 20 great Google tricks.

August 2003:

For all you Google­philes out there, the search engine com­pany recently added a new oper­a­tor that it rec­og­nizes ~ the tilde char­ac­ter. Basi­cally, you can do searches like: ~mas­ter –mas­ter and get results like MASTA and mas­ter­ing. Very nifty.

Microdoc News men­tions some advice on using the new fea­ture by Andy Baio at waxy.org.

Writes Andy:

Curi­ous about what syn­onyms Google is using for its new syn­onym oper­a­tor? Try search­ing for your syn­onym key­word and then exclude the same key­word from results, like so:

~help –help = guide, man­ual, faq, sup­port, tuto­r­ial, help­ing, tips, prob­lems
~search –search = finder, list­ings, searcher, data­base
~blog –blog = log, weblog, blog­ger
~rss –rss = xml, rdf
~tivo –tivo = directv, replaytv, replay, pvr, video recorder
~idiot –idiot = stupid

Also, from posters on Andy’s site:

~love = roman­tic, mar­riage, lovers, compatibility.

~Scot­tish = Scot­land, Celtic, Edin­burgh, BBC (?!), Gaelic and Glas­gow. No Aberdeen, Dundee, Stir­ling or Inver­ness (the other of Scot­land 6 cities) and thank­fully no kilts hag­gis or bag­pipes

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.