Google provides a powerful search engine that indexes web pages. It allows for various search techniques like phrase searches using quotes, Boolean logic using AND, OR and parentheses, negation using dashes, and including synonyms using tildes. Google ignores common words by default but they can be explicitly included using plus signs. The site, inurl and related syntaxes allow narrowing searches to specific sites, URLs or related pages. Number ranges and wildcards can be used. The Feeling Lucky button directly takes users to the top search result. Within-results searching allows refining an initial result set.

1. GOOGLE SEARCH TECHNIQUES

2. Google Search Techniques
1. What is Google?
2. Google Web Search Basics
3. Full-Word Wildcards
4. Special Syntax
5. Special Search

3. 1. What is Google?
 Google is a full-text search engine, which uses
computerized "spiders" to index millions, sometimes
billions, of pages, allowing for much narrower searches
than searchable subject index, which searches only the
titles and descriptions of sites, and doesn't search
individual pages
 Google is case-insensitive. If you search for seven,
SEVEN, sEvEn, or even 7, you get the same results.
 Singular is different from plural. Searches for apple and
apples turn up different pages
 The order of words matters. Google considers the first
word most important, the second word next, and so on
 Google ignores most little words, including include "I,"
"where," "how," "the," "of," "an," "for," "from," "how," 'it," "in,"
and "is,“.
 Google search word limit is 32

4.  Google Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts -
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest
relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on
your choice of query or topic
 Google News Search – http://news.google.com/
 Google Blog Search -
http://blogsearch.google.com/
 Google Book Search - http://books.google.com/
 Google Image Search - http://images.google.com/
 Google Maps Search - http://maps.google.com/
 Google Product Search -
http://www.google.com/products
 Google Scholar Search - http://scholar.google.com
 Google Group Search - http://groups.google.com
 Google Video Search - http://video.google.com/

5.  Google Mobile -
http://www.google.com/mobile/
 Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/
 Google Finance -
http://finance.google.com/
 Google Blog - http://www.blogger.com
 Google Photo -
http://picasaweb.google.com
 Google Language Tools -
http://www.google.com/language_tools
 Google Pack - http://pack.google.com
 Google Gmail - http://gmail.google.com
 And more on Google Labs -
http://labs.google.com/

6. 2. Google Web Search Basics
1. Phrase Searches
 Enter key words search techniques. Google will find matches where the
keywords appear anywhere on the page
 If you want Google to find you matches where the keywords appear together as
a phrase, surround them with quotes, like this “search techniques”
2. Basic Boolean
 Google's Boolean default is AND, which means that if you enter query words
without modifiers, Google will search for all your query words
 If you prefer to specify that any one word or phrase is acceptable, put an OR (in
capital letter), lower case or won’t work correctly. For example: enter Yahoo
OR Google.
 A computer programming character | can work like OR (e.g. Yahoo | Google)
 If you want to search for a particular term along with two or more other terms,
group the other terms within parentheses, like so “search techniques” (Yahoo
OR Google)

7. 3. Negation
 If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your
results, prepend a (minus sign or dash): “search techniques” –Google.
This will search the pages that contain “search techniques”, but not the
word Google
 Note that the symbol must appear directly before the word or phrase
that you don't want. If there's space between, as in the following
query, it won't work as expected “search techniques” – Google
4. Explicit Inclusion
 Google will search for all the keywords and phrases that you specify,
however, there are certain words that Google will ignore because they
are considered too common to be of any use in the search (e.g. “a”,
“the”, “of”, etc.)
 You can force Google to take a stop word into account by prepending a
+ (plus) character, as in +the “search techniques”.

8. 5. Synonyms
 The Google synonym operator, the ~ (tilde) character, prepended
to any number of keywords in your query, asks Google to include
not only exact matches, but also what it thinks are synonyms for
each of the keywords. Searching for: ~ape turns up results for
monkey, gorilla, chimpanzee, and others (both singular and plural
forms) of the ape or related family, as if you'd searched for:
monkey gorilla chimpanzee (Synonyms are bolded along with
exact keyword matches on the results page, so they're easy to
spot)
6. Number Range
 The number range operator, .. (two periods), looks for results that fall inside
your specified numeric range (e.g. digital camera 3..5 megapixel $800..$1000)
 You can also use the number range syntax with just one number, making it the
minimum or maximum of your query (e.g. digital camera ..5 megapixel $800..)

9. 7. Simple Searching and Feeling Lucky
 The I'm Feeling Lucky™ button is a thing of beauty. Rather than
giving you a list of search results from which to choose, you're
whisked away to what Google believes is the most relevant page
given your search (i.e., the first result in the list). Entering washington
post and clicking the I'm Feeling Lucky button takes you directly to
http://www.washingtonpost.com.
8. Searching Within Your Results
 Help you narrow down your results to find the really relevant pages
within your results pages only.
 Click Search within results link at the bottom of every results page. It
will shows below and you can enter another keyword

10. 3. Full-Word Wildcards
 the wildcard will act as a substitute for one full word.
Searching for sevEN* mice, therefore, finds three blind mice,
7 blue mice, sevengreen mice, etc.
 * is a stand-in for one word; ** signifies two words, and so on

11. 4. Special Syntax
 site: allows you to narrow your search by a site or by a
top-level domain
 site:org
 inurl: restricts your search to the URLs of web pages. This
syntax usually works well for finding search and help
pages because they tend to be regular in composition. An
allinurl: variation finds all the words listed in a URL
 inurl:virus
 link: returns a list of pages that link to the specified URL.
Enter link:www.google.com and you'll get a list of pages
that link to the Google home page,
http://www.google.com (not anywhere in the google.com
domain)
 cache: finds a copy of the page that Google indexed even
if that page is no longer available at its original URL or has
since changed its content completely

12.  filetype: searches the suffixes or filename extensions
 "leading economic indicators" filetype:doc , filetype:ppt
 related: , as you might expect, finds pages that are
related to the specified page. This is a good way to
find categories of pages; a search for
related:google.com returns a variety of search
engines, including Lycos, Yahoo!, and Northern Light
 info:www.nytimes.com/technology
 phonebook: , as you might expect, looks up phone
numbers
 phonebook:(510) 555-1212 or phonebook: <name>
 define: gives you a page full of definitions of a word
from around the Web
 movie: syntax to find reviews of movies on the Web
 music: explicitly searches for music-related
information

13. 5. Special Search
 http://directory.google.com/

14. Thanks
Nirav