Google Search Operators: Complete List in 2020 [over 100]

Operators are special characters and commands that expand the capabilities of Google’s regular text search. Their scope is very wide, from research on the competitive environment and the search for plagiarism to technical search engine optimization. Operators are divided into basic and advanced or ASO(Advanced Search Operators), and some professionals also distinguish the concept of commands. Basic operators are made up of characters and are used at the beginning or end of a keyword or phrase, for example, “”. Boolean Google search operators are also considered to be basic, also known as logical, for example, AND. Advanced operators can be character combinations or expressions used to produce more relevant search results, such as AROUND(#). A search command is a conditional term that does not have an official definition, but in the general case, is an operator that does not need additional arguments, for example, define:backlink.

Operators are closely related to the search operation but can be used not only in Google Search, other services, such as Google Maps, Google Drive, Gmail, and even Google Alert, support the use of various operators to simplify the process of finding the necessary information. The launch of new Google services has often been accompanied by the emergence of new operators whose support ceased if the service was closed.

Here are some examples of why Google search operators and search commands are used:

improving the relevance of search results
detailed analysis of a topic or object of interest
competitive analysis and collection of public analytics
basic and technical search engine optimization
analysis of the content of the website or resource
verification and analysis of indexing
search in specific sections, domains, or subdomains
search for duplicates

It is important to remember three things when working with operators:

Google ignores all punctuation that does not apply to operators
For a Google operator to work correctly, it should not have a space in it. For example, site:google.com will work, while site: google.com will not.
Try to avoid overusing Google search operators. 5 operators in one search is considered to be optimal.

Application

For example, you want to launch a distance learning project and you need to do competitor research.

Google Search Operators Cheat Sheet

(“Keyword” OR “synonym”) (“keyword” OR “synonym”)

The request can be clarified or expanded, for example, by using common synonyms and expressions (Google Advanced Search Operators), such as distance education, online learning, and so on.

With the help of the intext: operator and parentheses, the search is done only in the website text:

You can compare the results with the headings using the intitle: operator:

For example, you want to filter out the .gov domains out of the search results:

Or the other way around, show only .com ones:

You can also exclude the results that do not contain the desired values in the links by adding the inurl: operator:

If you want to find blogs on a topic with a guest-posting possibility, it would be enough to make a slight change the Google search commands to: inurl:become (author OR writer OR contributor) intext:(distance OR online) learning intitle:blog

Web indexing and HTTPS check

To find potential security risks or pages that you might have missed when migrating to HTTPS you can use these two operators:

Searching for Inbound Links

To find the pages that have links to your site, use the link: operator, but do not forget to exclude the subdomains of your site from the results using -site: *.websitename