During my time, especially in the early days of modern computers, Google has been my first place to search for everything. I can just type to the box, and then hit enter to get the result that I want. Most of the time, I get what I was looking for, it was the information I tried to find and then I called it a day.
But as I grow older, things start to change, especially in my Google’s search result. I can’t get what I need. The things I have been looking for also not showing up, and what I got is mostly a site that has almost nothing related to it. Not to mention that it is harder to get the result from a trusted site, or sorting the result based on its upload time, especially when I searched for advanced golang topics. For example, if I was looking for a news related to an event that occurred a while ago in a social media, almost certainly what I got is only the ‘reposter’ of the news from a not-so prominent news site. I hate it when it happen. Then I start thinking of how to get what I need from the result of my Google search.
Actually, there is a good news. As we all know, Google is a giant tech company that have top tier engineers working in there. They know that this was going to happen, and also give us a way to accomplish a better search result, narrowed down to the last xxx to get the search we’re looking for. Simply put, Google has several keyword available to be used within our search query. In this page, I will try to explain as deep as possible all the available keyword, its usecase, and the search result.
The keyword site can be used to narrow down the search result to only give from a site we want. This is the example use of keyword site. I’ll be using it to search Golang’s goroutine courses / blog only from freecodecamp’s site.
golang goroutine site:freecodecamp.org
From that query, Google give us result similar like this (maybe different when tried on different time)
As we can see, the search result only showing pages from freecodecamp website, and we can use this keyword to filter the search result from the website, as long as the website is indexed by Google of course.
The keyword filetype can be used to filter the result based on the type of file we’re looking for. The simplest usecase for this keyword is to search a book, or a movie. By utilizing this, we prevent ourselves to be shown result from some random crappy website in which the file we’re looking for is never existed. To demonstrate the usage, I’ll search for a book titled Atomic Habit with file type is PDF.
disclaimer: I wasn’t sure that the result is legit / a piracy, so proceed with your own and avoid piracy
Below are a few commonly used keyword filter for filetype. Remember, you can always change or use other keyword to filter your result.
The next keyword to be used is quotation marks (“”). This symbol can narrow our search to result that contains what word / sentence quoted. For example, we can use this to find a news in which a president is saying something. To demonstrate, I will try to find the news in which President Joko Widodo was insulted by Rocky Gerung.
