Development Matters Blog

Most of the people who use Google search think of the Advanced Search option when they want to perform some more controllable searches. However, Advanced Search only offers a bit of Google’s search capabilities. Below are a few basic tips to extend the search knowledge of an average user.

• +Term. When you search for often used words, like how, where, or the, they will be ignored. But if you want to have them in your search string you have to put a ‘+’ right on their left, e.g. “+how +to ax 2009 demo”
• -Term. Use this when you want to exclude pages with certain words. That is most useful when you search for someone who has the same name as a celebrity, e.g. “Chuck Norris -actor -karate -facts -sport -video -youtube.com”. (Of course, in this case, this doesn’t work because no one else can have the name Chuck Norris)
• ‘*’. Replaces one or more words, e.g.  ” “AX * Snap In” “
• Advanced Operators. The form for using advanced operators is operator:searching_term. There are many different operators and I will describe few.
  • Operator ‘site’. This limits the search results onto a certain web site or a group of web sites on the same domain, e.g. “AX site:meritsolutions.com”
  • Operator ‘filetype’. This is useful when you are looking for a certain filetype in your results. Note: Don’t put a dot in front of the extension. Another good example is “AX 2009 filetype:pdf”
  • Operator ‘link’. With this operator, you provide the url and you will get all pages which have links toward it. Let’s see the incoming links for the Merit Solutions’ homepage with the query “link:http://www.meritsolutions.com -site:www.meritsolutions.com”
  • Operator ‘intitle’. This Operator filters the results to only those who have the search term in the title, e.g. “intitle:AX.2009. site:www.meritsolutions.com”
  • Operator ‘inurl’. This Operator filters the results to those who have the search term in the url. Let’s try to find the download page of Vendors Journal AX Snap-In on meritsolutions.com, e.g. “AX Snap In site:www.meritsolutions.com inurl:download”

Of course there are many more tips out there – and I invite you to share your Dynamics search tips below.