Complex queries help you get the most relevant results and save you time

As I read some days ago, only 2% of Internet users actually use Google’s advanced operators for searching. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to create advanced search queries. In this post I presume that you know how to use Google operators so have a quick look at them before reading more.

Sometimes my friends ask me “How did you find that?” and the answer is “By using complex queries“.

I’ll show you some examples:

Searching for software and files

If you where to download Photoshop for free (Photoshop is shareware and downloading it without paying is illegal and can contain viruses and trojans, we use it here as an example), the most common search would probably be photoshop download or photoshop rapidshare and these would work pretty well. But you can mix both plus improve it drastically like this:

photoshop download|torrent|megaupload|rapidshare|filefactory|mediafire -trial -demo -buy

Compare them.

Google results for Photoshop using complex queries

The last one searches among 4 file hosting sites and torrents while excluding trial/demo versions or online shops. All in one query hence showing relevant results and saving you time.

Searching for tutorials

You can learn anything through the Internet, there are thousands of tutorials out there. If I was to learn kite surfing (some day I’ll do) I could search how to kite surf or the improved search query:

"kite surf" ~tutorial|~learn|~guide|~manual|~reference|~example|"how do i"|"how to"|~faq

If someone wrote a tutorial on Kite surfing but titled it as “Kite surfing beginners guide” the first simple query would not show it in the results but the second one would.

Steps to create an effective query

• Add synonyms to a word by adding | between them. As we have seen in the example where we searched tutorials, I had added some tutorial synonyms like manual or guide.
• Use the ~ prefix in every word that doesn’t need to be exactly like that.
• Instead of searching “i want cold beer fast“, try thinking from the publisher’s perspective. If I created a guide on how to get cold beer in 5 seconds, I would probably label my work “How to freeze a beer in 5 seconds” so go search those words!
• A good practice to improve your searching skills is to investigate the websites title, keywords in the content, the links that provide, the format of the URLs, etc… and then use operators like intitle:, inurl:, intext:…
• Remove unnecessary keywords and don’t add those that are not strictly necessary. If you are searching for Photoshop cracks, don’t add the “free” word since you may get irrelevant results.
• Under extreme circumstances were you can’t find what you are looking for try adding translations of the keywords in other languages: download|descarga|telecharger
• Other search engines like Yahoo or Bing have useful operators that Google doesn’t and may be useful depending on what you are looking for (like looking for specific file extensions in links from pages).

Useful tools to automatize the search

Sometimes adding symbols and brainstorming about synonyms to improve the query may be too tedious. Here I list a couple of services that you can find useful.

Google Advanced Search form

A simple but nice Google tool to aid you in creating complex queries. Check it out.

Google Advanced Search

SkyScarf Google world group

In SkyScarf there’s a new Google world search group that improves your queries automatically. You just need to type photoshop in SkyScarf and click the Download button.
Or even faster, type .download photoshop in SkyScarf and press Enter.
There is a great collection of buttons that will suit nearly all your needs: software, tutorials, documents, spreadsheets, ebooks/pdfs, mp3 files, torrents, definitions…

Searching kite surfing tutorials through SkyScarf's tutorial query

In the picture above, the user has typed kite surfing and is going to click the Tutorials button. He can also type .tutorial kite surfing and press the Enter key. The dot at the beginning tells SkyScarf that we want to use a prefix. Learn more about SkyScarf prefixes here.

Got a nice query to search? Let us know and we’ll add it!

Oh, and we are also open for new ideas or ways of improving SkyScarf. Every good piece of feedback is appreciated and in some cases rewarded!