First and foremost Google automatically assumes that two or more words in the search box are “AND” searches. This means “First Last” are First AND Last.
Other search operators for Google are:
Symbol | Function |
|---|---|
" " | Put any phrase in quotes to force Google to use exact-match. On single words, prevents synonyms. |
OR | Google search defaults to logical AND between terms. Specify "OR" for a logical OR (ALL-CAPS). |
| | The pipe (|) operator is identical to "OR". |
( ) | Use parentheses to group operators and control the order in which they execute. |
– | Put minus (-) in front of any term (including operators) to exclude that term from the results. |
* | An asterisk (*) acts as a wild-card and will match on any word. |
Google Tips and Tricks
- You can chain together almost any combination of text searches, basic operators, and advanced operators
Bing
First and foremost Bing automatically assumes that two or more words in the search box are “AND” searches. This means “First Last” are First AND Last.
Other search operators for Bing are:
Symbol | Function |
|---|---|
+ | Finds webpages that contain all the terms that are preceded by the + symbol. Also allows you to include terms that are usually ignored. |
" " | Finds the exact words in a phrase. |
() | Finds or excludes webpages that contain a group of words. |
AND or & | Finds webpages that contain all the terms or phrases. |
NOT or – | Excludes webpages that contain a term or phrase. |
OR or | | Finds webpages that contain either of the terms or phrases. |
Bing Tips and Tricks
- You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted to speed a full-text search.
- Stop words and all punctuation marks, except for the symbols noted in this topic, are ignored unless they are surrounded by quotation marks or preceded by the + symbol.
- Only the first 10 terms are used to get search results.
