Here are some search syntax basics and advanced tricks for Google.com. You might know most of these, but if you spot a new one, it may come in handy in future searches.
A quote/ phrase search can be written with both quotations ["like this"] as well as a minus in-between words, [like-this].
You can find synonyms of words. E.g. when you search for [house] but you want to find “home” too, search for [~house]. To get to know which synonyms the Google database stores for individual words, simply use the minus operator to exclude synonym after synonym (they will always show as bold in the SERPs, the search engine result pages). Like this: [~house -house -home -housing -floor].
Google has a lesser known “numrange” operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2000..2005] (that’s two dots inbetween two numbers) will find 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on until 2005.
Google has some exciting back-end AI to allow you to find just the facts upong entering simple questions or phrases like [when was Einstein born?] or [einstein birthday] (the answer to both of these queries is “Albert Einstein – Date of Birth: 14 March 1879”). This feature was introduced April this year and is called Google Q&A. (See some of the various working Q&A sample queries to get a feeling for what’s possible.)
Sometimes, Google warns you about its results, especially when they might seem like promoting hate sites (of course, only someone misunderstanding how Google works could think it’s them promoting hate sites). Enter [jew], and you will see a Google-sponsored link titled “Offensive Search Results” leading to this explanation.
For some of the more popular “Googlebombed” results, like when you enter [failure] and the first hit is the biography of George W. Bush, Google displays explanatory ads titled “Why these results?”.
clipped from: blog.outer-court.com 