Search Operators tell Search Engine what exactly you want

Everybody knows the benefit of using search operators while searching in search engines and for those who are unaware of it, its like redefining your search that interprets to SE exactly what you want. Every operator has its function and almost every search engine supports them. Although a very few operators might vary across Search Engines but almost all of them are common. So if you are a Google freak or a Yahoo user or Msn live search user, this article is for you.

And – If you want to search for wordpress theme, you would use the term “WordPress theme”. This results the pages containing both the keywords. This is because AND is used by SE as default. Your search is equivalent to “WordPress AND theme”.

OR – If you want that either of the keywords should be acceptable then you can use OR. Doing a search for “themes OR templates” will return pages that contain either the keyword themes or the keyword template. If you want the exact phrase you can group your search within ” “. Doing a search for “Search Engine Optimization” will show all the pages where all three of them are together and in the same sequence

Using * – Searching for “Windows *” will show pages containing Windows Vista, Windows Update and so on. (Just like the WILD CARDS)

site: – It searches in the exact site. Doing a search “site:adobe.com air” will return pages from adobe.com containing the keyword air.

ink: – Doing a search “link:<url>” (replace url with the one you want) will retrieve the page containing links to the url.

cache: – Doing a search “cache:<url>” (replace url with the one you want) will retrieve the page from google cache. The page will be viewed as it was when last crawled by Googlebot.

define: – It returns the word meaning. Doing a search of “define:blog” will return a definition of blog

info: – It will return the info Google has about the page.

intitle: – It restricts your search to the titles of the pages only.

allintitle: – It restricts the search to the pages where all specified words make up the title of the web page.

inurl: – It restricts your search to the URLs of web pages.

allinurl: – It restricts the search to the pages where all specified words make up the URL of the web page.

intext: – It searches only in body test ignoring link text, URLs & titles.

allintext: – It searches for all of the specified words in the body text.

inanchor: – It searches for text in a page’s link anchors. A link anchor is the
descriptive text of a link.

For Official list of operators, you can check these:

Google Search

Yahoo Search

Msn Live Search

Do tell me which are your most used operators through comments!