Insights:Google Search Operators
At Insight, a lot of our time is spent convincing consumers to visit our many clients’ websites or social media pages. In fact, some of the people on our digital team spend their entire workday doing just that, and they’re darn good at it.
While traditional and digital marketing are great ways to promote websites and grow market share, many people also use search engines to find what they are looking for online. Even the Insight team uses search engines to assist us in research efforts and staying current on the latest industry news and trends.
With close to two billion active websites it can prove challenging to find the exact information you need. It gets even more difficult when your search terms use words that are homonyms, like the bark of a dog and the bark on a tree. The English language is not ideal for digital search.
To help us be more efficient, we use what are called Google Search Operators – or colloquially, Google Shortcuts. Since we know our blog readers are busy people, we thought it would be nice to share a few of our favorite shortcuts with you:
Quotation Marks – When you put quotation marks around a phrase, Google will provide exact matches for the phrase and not the individual words.
Two Periods – To find things within a certain range, whether it’s time, price or a measurement, two periods will deliver the information you’re looking for based on your parameters. For example – Cars $5,000..$10,000.
Site Query – If you want to find something in a specific site, like cotton candy, you would type in the search area – site:candystore.com cotton candy. This is useful if the site you’re using doesn’t have a search function or a poorly developed search tool.
Hyphens –You can exclude a term from your search results by placing a hyphen in front of it. For example – Airplane – models. This would eliminate model airplanes from your search results.
Related – If you find a website you love and want to find more like it, simply structure your search query like this -related:walmart.com and you’ll be directed to sites that offer similar content.
Intext – By putting “intext:” in front of your search term Google will search for matches within a webpage’s body text.
There are many more Google shortcuts that can be used, we chose these six because they offer a quick solution to some of the most common search challenges. If you’d like to learn more about Google marketing options give our digital team a call at 605-275-0011 or send them an email.
Until next time, happy searching.