Dangerous Google Searching

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web

But most people don't use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google's index, it's still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.
Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages.

Syntax Search Tricks

Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:"Three Blind Mice") restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you're searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you're looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don't want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

link: restricts results to sites containing links to the specified location
Example: link:www.google.com will return documents containing one or more links to www.google.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages.

inurl: restricts results to sites whose URL contains the specified phrase
for
example inurl:fox fire will find all sites containing the word fire in the text and fox in the URL

allinurl: restricts results to sites whose URL contains all the specified phrases
for
example:allinurl:fox fire will find all sites with the words fox and fire in the URL, so it's equivalent to inurl:fox inurl:fire

filetype, etc :restricts results to documents of the specified type
Example:filetype:pdf fire will return PDFs containing the word fire, while filetype:xls fox will return Excel spreadsheets with the word fox

numrange: restricts results to documents containing a number from the specified range
Example: numrange:1-100 fire will return sites containing a number from 1 to 100 and the word fire. The same result can be achieved with 1..100 fire

inanchor: restricts results to sites containing links with the specified phrase in their descriptions
Example:inanchor:fire will return documents with links whose description contains the word fire (that's the actual link text, not the URL indicated by the link)

allintext: restricts results to documents containing the specified phrase in the text, but not in the title, link descriptions or URLs
Example: allintext:"fire fox" will return documents which contain the phrase fire fox in their text only

+ : specifies that a phrase should occur frequently in results
Ex:+fire will order results by the number of occurrences of the word fire

- : specifies that a phrase must not occur in results
Ex: -fire will return documents that don't contain the word fire

"" : delimiters for entire search phrases (not single words)
Ex: "fire fox" will return documents containing the phrase fire fox

. : wildcard for a single character fire.fox will return documents containing the phrases
fire fox, fireAfox, fire1fox, fire-fox etc.

* : wildcard for a single word fire * fox will return documents containing the phrases
fire the fox, fire in fox, fire or fox etc.

|: logical OR "fire fox" | firefox will return documents containing phrase fire fox or the word firefox