Operators in Google Search

Matthew Edgar | August 15, 2024

The site: operator is a great way to find out what pages Google has found on a website. Here are five ways to make the site: operator even more useful…

Tip #1: inurl

By typing “site:amazon.com” into Google, you’ll see every page Google knows about on Amazon’s website. That can return a lot of pages so this can be narrowed down with the “inurl” operator. The inurl operator narrows the search to only pages that have a certain word in the URL. For example, search this to find all pages on Amazon’s site that include the word “prime” in the URL.

site:amazon.com inurl:prime

Tip #2: -inurl

You can also use the inurl as a negative. In the screenshot attached, I searched for everything on Amazon.com excluding any URL that includes www.

site:amazon.com -inurl:www.amazon.com

This type of search is a great way to find subdomains that Google may have found on a website. For many companies, I’ve used this type of search to find their staging environments indexed in search results!

Tip #3: intext

The intext operator works like to the inurl operator but it searches in the text of the page. For example, I could plug this into Google search to find every page on Amazon’s site that references books.

site:amazon.com intext:books

You can also use a phrase in quotes to find pages that include that particular phrase in the text. This returns a narrower result than a search without the intext operator. For example, I could find all pages referencing a particular book on Amazon’s website using this search:

site:amazon.com intext:"Tech SEO Guide"

Tip #4: intitle

The intitle operator lets you narrow results to anything that has a particular word in their title. For example, this query would let me find any page on Amazon’s website that references the word sale.

site:amazon.com intitle:sale

Of course, this operator can be combined with the other operators to locate more specific types of content. For example, this query would let me find any page on Amazon’s site with “sale” in the title even though the page’s URL doesn’t include sale and the page doesn’t reference “deal”.

site:amazon.com intitle:sale -inurl:sale -intext:deal

Tip #5: filetype

One last tip. The filetype operator to further narrow search results. For example, I could search for this to find all the PDFs Google knows about on Amazon’s website.

site:amazon.com filetype:pdf