General Google search tips
Advanced Search
If you do not want to write out search commands (explained below), you can use the drop-down menus in Google's
Advanced Search page to obtain the same results.
Contextual searching
As a language learner, you typically need to see words in context. The general Google page (google.com) or variants thereof (google.es etc.) often place high manufacturers, vendors and other websites that do not help you see how words are used. Learn to use
Google News (various language versions available),
Google Blog Search,
Google Groups,
Book Search,
Scholar.
You can search government (
word site:gov) or university (
word site:edu) websites only.
If you want to limit search to a particular website, formulate your query this way:
word site:forum.wordreference.com.
Time-saving tip: If you use the site:forum.wordreference.com trick often, you might want to bookmark one of your searches, for
example saudade site:forum.wordreference.com, and simply replace "saudade" by another expression instead of typing
site:forum.wordreference.com over and over.
Operator "and"
This one is assumed by default. You can search for
peanut jelly and
+peanut +jelly with the same results. Unless you use quotation marks (see later) or write + in front of it, the word
and will be ignored as one of the so-called stop words (common short words that slow down the search without improving the results).
Operator "or"
OR searches for page with either of two terms or with both. It can be replaced by the | symbol, so that
supply OR demand and
supply | demand yield the same results (notice that OR has to be upper-case). You can use OR/| for chains of words. If you combine OR with other operator (including the implicit AND), use nesting, i.e. parentheses.
Operator "without"
To exclude a word from the search, write - in front of it and do not leave a space. For
example corporate -governance finds all websites that speak about "corporate" but do not mention "governance". You can exclude several words.
Phrase search
To find websites with two or more specific words next to each other in a predetermined order, wrap the search string in quotation marks or hyphenate them.
Example:
"wreak havoc";
example:
wreak-havoc. (The hyphenated variant also searches for
wreakhavoc, so the numbers of hits differ a bit.)
Notice that you can combine those with isolated words.
Example:
wreak-havoc earthquake. In this case, "earthquake" will be somewhere in the same document but not necessarily in the immediate neighborhood of "wreak havoc".
Wildcards
You can use wildcards to replace one or several complete words. As of now, you cannot replace parts of words with wildcards.
* usually finds strings with one word in place of the asterisk.
Example:
"have never * china"
** usually finds strings with two words in place of the asterisks.
Example:
"have never ** china"
*** usually finds strings with three and more words in place of the asterisks.
Example:
"have never *** china"
Four and more asterisks in a row do not always yield convincing results.
You can combine several asterisks in a search string.
Example:
"is not as * as * brother"
Naturally, it does not make sense to put asterisks at the beginning and at the end of search strings.
Compound searches
You can combine the "", OR, * and - operators.
Example:
"have never seen my (mother OR father) cry"
Example:
"have never seen my (mother OR father) (cry OR laugh)"
Example:
"have never seen * (mother OR father) (cry OR smile)"
Definitions
Use the "define" command. Google will search well-ranked glossaries and similar resources.
Example:
define:subjunctive mood
Example: define:call option
Word stemming
Google has a stemming technology. If you look for
happy, you will also get results for
happiness. Unfortunately, this cannot be combined with restrictions like
site:forum.wordreference.com. Also notice that this feature is not available for all languages.
Synonyms and related words
The operator ~ in front of a word searches for synonyms and related words, too.
Example:
~etymology (also finds "origin of words", "word origin" etc.)
For English Only so far.
Anchor words
Listen to what other people say. If I link to the WR forums this way:
the best language forum, the clickable words
the, best, language, forum are called "anchor words". The command
inanchor helps you find the most frequently linked to (and anchored) websites. You can combine it with quotation marks or use the
allinanchor command (the latter.
Example:
inanchor:"russian grammar"
Example:
allinanchor:excellent spanish grammar ~reference - the
~reference part also finds websites linked to as "guide", "tutorial", "help", "review" and so on.
Some other operators are explained here.
