Google Search Operator Builder

Search engines understand a small language of operators that narrow results far beyond what keywords can. site: limits the search to one website, filetype:pdf to PDF documents, intitle: to pages with a word in their title. Few people remember the syntax, and fewer remember where Bing and DuckDuckGo differ. This builder lets you fill in what you know and writes the query.

The operators

Plain words must all appear (Google ANDs them automatically). An exact phrase goes in quotation marks. “Any of these words” becomes a bracketed OR group, and “none of these” puts a minus sign before each word. site: accepts a domain, a subdomain or an ending such as .gov; -site: removes one. filetype: takes pdf, docx, xlsx, pptx, csv and others. intitle:, inurl: and intext: look for a word in the title, the address or the body of the page.

Dates and number ranges

On Google, after:2026-01-01 and before:2026-03-31 keep results inside a date window, and 100..200 finds numbers in a range, useful for prices or years. The dates must be in the YYYY-MM-DD form, which the date pickers produce for you.

Differences between engines

Switch the engine and the query adapts. Bing has no inurl: (the tool writes its closest equivalent and warns that it may be ignored), uses inbody: for text, and has no before:, after: or ranges. DuckDuckGo supports site:, filetype:, intitle: and inurl: but ignores intext:. Warnings appear under the query whenever a field cannot be expressed.

Recipes for everyday tasks

The examples cover common jobs: listing indexed pages of a site; finding government PDFs on a topic; finding mentions of a brand on other sites by excluding its own domain; finding guest-post opportunities in a niche; finding slide decks; and finding news in a date window. Choose one, then edit the fields. For instance, the government example produces climate adaptation site:.gov filetype:pdf.

What operators cannot do

Operators are strong hints, not database queries. Result counts are rough estimates, a site: search does not list every page Google has indexed, and some operators are applied loosely when results are scarce. For the real index status of your own site, use Google Search Console. The cache: operator was retired in 2024 and related: no longer returns useful results, so neither is offered here; use the Wayback Machine for old versions of a page.

Searching responsibly

Operators only find what search engines already show anyone. If a search turns up personal data or documents that look as if they were published by mistake, do not use or share them; tell the site owner instead.

Combining operators well

Start broad and add one operator at a time, checking the results after each change. Two or three operators usually do the job: a phrase, a site or file type, and perhaps an exclusion. Stacking many operators makes it more likely that the engine relaxes some of them silently, and a typo in one (a space after site:, for example) turns it into an ordinary search word. If a query returns nothing, remove the last operator you added first.

Useful combinations

Some pairings come up again and again. site: with filetype: finds a report on an organisation’s own server. An exact phrase with -site: finds who quotes or copies your text. intitle: with a topic word finds pages that are about the topic rather than ones that mention it once. Dates with a phrase show how coverage of a subject changed over a year.

Related tools

Write Boolean strings for databases and LinkedIn with the Boolean Search Builder, collect links from a results page with Extract URLs, make clean page addresses with the Slug Generator, or count words in what you find with the Word Counter.