Negative Search Operators

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I discuss Google's special search operators in Chapter 2. Here, I want to point out that you can make Bizarro commands of Google by turning its search operators into negative operators. A simple minus sign does the trick:

searching google index -site:google.com

This string displays hits about searching Google from all over the Web except at the Google site - a good way to escape in-house Google Help pages.

The same search tactic applies to the inurl and intitle operators. Using the negative intitle operator helps dig beneath the surface. The biggest, loudest sites in a Google results page usually contain your keywords in the page title as well as in the page's text. Forcing the keywords out of the title tends to bring secondary page up toward the top of the results list.

Tip 

As of this writing, the negative trick doesn't work with the allintitle and allinurl operators. In both cases, the negative command works only with the first keyword following the command, not with all keywords as the positive command does.

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