Data Mining on the Internet with Google

Expand your power of Google.

Google (and many other search engines) has the ability not only to search on keywords, but also using a more “database-ish” query language to really narrow down your search results. The following is a summary of a few of the most useful lesser known features.

Helpful tips include:

  • Setting the “Advanced Search” options to display more than ten results per page.
  • To include phrases quote the words together (straight quotes). For instance, “Bill Clinton” returns results as most expect whereas a search for Bill Clinton will return pages with the two words anywhere in the resultant page.
  • To exclude words in a search prefix the word or phrase with a minus sign (-)
  • To restrict a search to a specific domain such as UCLA, use the modifier inurl: (thus, for UCLA append inurl:ucla.edu to the search).

Taken from:
http://www.cwire.org/data-mining-using-google/

There are (now) many pages for crafting better searches.

Google’s help on Google:
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/basics.html
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/refinesearch.html

Firefox add-on for these search modifiers:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2144/