40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.
I've used and often rely on nearly all these operators and tricks... although I have to say the color picker was a new one on me!
(One missing, I think: the "pipe" symbol, |, or the capitalized word "OR" -- it lets you specify that either option to the left or right of the pipe/OR is acceptable. E.g.: "buying | buyers guide" will pick up stuff containing either the exact phrase "buying guide" OR the exact phrase "buyers guide". You can also use it outside of quotation marks, as in:
"buyers guide" OR "users guide"
(Note BTW: Google seems to ignore interior quotation like the apostrophe in "buyer's" so it's okay to omit.))
I find inurl: too inconsistently useful lately, although it used to work as advertised.
One Google tool I fall back on occasionally -- not strictly a search tool -- is the Google Ngram Viewer, here:
It shows the frequency of occurrence, OVER TIME, of the term(s) (words or phrases) enclosed within commas -- searching the entire Google Books corpus of OCR'd text. (Which means it's not 100% definitive, of course. Still, that's one heck of a large data set.) Why this may be especially useful for a researcher is that when you dig below the default interface (using the buttons etc. along the top of the screen), you'll eventually come upon links to THE ACTUAL TEXTS where the desired term(s) appeared in the chosen time period.
Re: searching text -- as a possible future topic for discussion? -- the Internet Archive's collection of texts is sometimes waaaay more useful than Google Books.
(Sorry for the digression -- got started and couldn't stop! 🤣)
Archivists should know that "The Internet Archive" a.k.a. The Wayback Machine is compromised. Specifically, they have removed content on request and cannot be classified a an indiscriminate Curator of the data.
If you believe something should be there, but it's not, try archive.ph
Especially if you're digging for info on high profile targets with a few buck to rub together, archive.ph is offshore, outside of U.S. jurisdiction, so they're out of reach of legal demands levied domestically, and also unlikely to yank content the U.S. State Department doesn't like, whereas the Internet Archive will fold.
In some cases that's true. But Taylor Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist, had her Twitter Profile archive excluded from the site back in April of 2022 after she doxxed the individual behind Libs of TikTok. The supreme irony could not be any more profound.
Internet Archive’s website states users can “email us with your URL (web address), in the body of your message to info@archive.org to request an exclusion" although they do not state on what basis such a request might be granted or denied.
In any case, it all serves to somewhat ameliorate the notion that the site is what its own name claims it to be. It's definitely something less; perhaps quit a bit less.
Oh, no, no, no! Trump loves smart people because they see that HE is the smartest person who has lived in the current historical epoch. He does NOT like recorded history. No records, please! The history He likes is the one featuring "a lotta people say," "everbody knows," and is evidence-free like his lawsuits. As with COVID-19, his suggested strateg-ery was to study and track less so there would be fewer cases. 'Everybody knows that if you report all those COVID cases, it's just going to make people sicker!'
Thank you for that clarification. It does not change the value of the Archive to date. (And also, the Wayback Machine is a subset of the Archive, not the other way around.)
Speaking for myself, I'm seldom "digging for info on high profile targets with a few bucks to rub together." I think the relative value of the two resources is vastly different for journalists (etc.) and the rest of us.
This article brings back memories of law school when LEXIS first appeared ( dating myself) and the librarian held classes teaching us all the search tools to do research.
Many are very similar and I had set them aside in my brain.
I had become lazy in searching on the web. That results in Spending lots of time sifting out the BS This is great.
A quick way to get access to some, though not all, of these search features is simply go use Google's Advanced Search. Just go to and bookmark https://www.google.com/advanced_search and you're all set.
I am so glad I found this post via notes, saved it to read later, and actually read through every sentence just now. Dunno why it feels like I am in a secret enclave community meeting organized by the head librarian, on how to run tags around surveillance systems. Lool! thanks would definitely be trying out all of the operators.
I also saved it in my "Read later if time" folder but nearly deleted it without reading it. After reading the article I understand what the "secret reference desk" in the title refers to but I initially assumed the article was about unlocking access to an Encyclopedia Britannica set or some other authoritative comprehensive source.
Maybe a title like "Google has a secret librarian to do your bidding" or something like that would attract more attention?
Or maybe it's only me who got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Do kids learn this in school? I am self taught 80 year old and there is so much out there! Lovely to learn new things. I passionately Hate Google and do not use it. AI drives me bats. Thank you for this which I have saved and restacted.
As a school librarian years ago, I used to teach my students 1) how to search e.g.using site:edu or org or com, use of quotations around words, -minus etc., what this meant and then how to evaluate results...e.g. Google rates most popular first, not by best. Not sure what they do now.
This is such a valuable article - thank you for taking the time to write it up! I use a lot of these every day and completely forget that they’re not common knowledge. The comments are a great reality check. You’ve probably just saved a lot of people hours of frustration. Really appreciate the effort that went into this.
And it was a great nudge that probably my colleagues don’t use these either - and we should revive “tips and tricks Tuesday”
So many good hacks here. I love “can anyone recommend” as a way to get genuine recommendations and not sponsored results. And “askew“ almost makes me miss working in an office…
What a generous share. Thank you. So much useful information here. This is why I love this platform. And I LOVE the photos of the stacks inside the library-my favorite place to find quiet when I was in college.
Really great list of tools here, some of which I did not know existed! As for Perplexity, I have begun to use it a lot, specifically because it explicitly and plainly provides the hyperlinks for each of its citations, which makes it easy for me to go the original source and do my own thinking.
I will try some of this stuff again in response to your posting. But much of it absolutely does not function for me. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to use text within quotes or use the minus sign to try to remove search terms only to keep seeing the same garbage results.
This will risk becoming a tangent, but the worst offender is Gmail, where I keep turning off AI enhancements that makes search useless, and Google keeps adding more and turning them back on without telling me. The worst offender is searching for 'Dr. Pulao' and getting results for 'rice' because the algorithm is helpfully auto translating foreign words even when they are obvious personal names.
Yep. At some time in the past, Google decided that it would no longer respect the search syntax convetion that had existed for decades. Now we have to use the "Verbatim" tool.
Enthusiastic thumbs-up, as always!
I've used and often rely on nearly all these operators and tricks... although I have to say the color picker was a new one on me!
(One missing, I think: the "pipe" symbol, |, or the capitalized word "OR" -- it lets you specify that either option to the left or right of the pipe/OR is acceptable. E.g.: "buying | buyers guide" will pick up stuff containing either the exact phrase "buying guide" OR the exact phrase "buyers guide". You can also use it outside of quotation marks, as in:
"buyers guide" OR "users guide"
(Note BTW: Google seems to ignore interior quotation like the apostrophe in "buyer's" so it's okay to omit.))
I find inurl: too inconsistently useful lately, although it used to work as advertised.
One Google tool I fall back on occasionally -- not strictly a search tool -- is the Google Ngram Viewer, here:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/
It shows the frequency of occurrence, OVER TIME, of the term(s) (words or phrases) enclosed within commas -- searching the entire Google Books corpus of OCR'd text. (Which means it's not 100% definitive, of course. Still, that's one heck of a large data set.) Why this may be especially useful for a researcher is that when you dig below the default interface (using the buttons etc. along the top of the screen), you'll eventually come upon links to THE ACTUAL TEXTS where the desired term(s) appeared in the chosen time period.
Re: searching text -- as a possible future topic for discussion? -- the Internet Archive's collection of texts is sometimes waaaay more useful than Google Books.
(Sorry for the digression -- got started and couldn't stop! 🤣)
Archivists should know that "The Internet Archive" a.k.a. The Wayback Machine is compromised. Specifically, they have removed content on request and cannot be classified a an indiscriminate Curator of the data.
If you believe something should be there, but it's not, try archive.ph
Especially if you're digging for info on high profile targets with a few buck to rub together, archive.ph is offshore, outside of U.S. jurisdiction, so they're out of reach of legal demands levied domestically, and also unlikely to yank content the U.S. State Department doesn't like, whereas the Internet Archive will fold.
While what you say is true, I think you're a bit too hard on archive.org.
They have been forced by the US court system to remove material that publishers deem to be copyrighted. It's not as though they *wanted* to do this!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/11/1103838/why-a-ruling-against-the-internet-archive-threatens-the-future-of-americas-libraries/
In some cases that's true. But Taylor Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist, had her Twitter Profile archive excluded from the site back in April of 2022 after she doxxed the individual behind Libs of TikTok. The supreme irony could not be any more profound.
Internet Archive’s website states users can “email us with your URL (web address), in the body of your message to info@archive.org to request an exclusion" although they do not state on what basis such a request might be granted or denied.
In any case, it all serves to somewhat ameliorate the notion that the site is what its own name claims it to be. It's definitely something less; perhaps quit a bit less.
Caveat emptor.
Oh, no, no, no! Trump loves smart people because they see that HE is the smartest person who has lived in the current historical epoch. He does NOT like recorded history. No records, please! The history He likes is the one featuring "a lotta people say," "everbody knows," and is evidence-free like his lawsuits. As with COVID-19, his suggested strateg-ery was to study and track less so there would be fewer cases. 'Everybody knows that if you report all those COVID cases, it's just going to make people sicker!'
Thank you for that clarification. It does not change the value of the Archive to date. (And also, the Wayback Machine is a subset of the Archive, not the other way around.)
Speaking for myself, I'm seldom "digging for info on high profile targets with a few bucks to rub together." I think the relative value of the two resources is vastly different for journalists (etc.) and the rest of us.
So useful!
Love the Internet Archive!
This is a fantastic resource. Thanks so much!
Just use -AI at the end of your search, this is one of a handful of ways excluding removing AI automatic use in various settings - just "Google it" ;)
Library nerd level 10 - thank you!
This is truly the HIGHEST praise 🤩 thank YOU!
This article brings back memories of law school when LEXIS first appeared ( dating myself) and the librarian held classes teaching us all the search tools to do research.
Many are very similar and I had set them aside in my brain.
I had become lazy in searching on the web. That results in Spending lots of time sifting out the BS This is great.
I remember using Metacrawler (released 1995). When Google came out, I also took the lazy way out, using Google exclusively.
With the "new ownership," its time to reconsider.
A quick way to get access to some, though not all, of these search features is simply go use Google's Advanced Search. Just go to and bookmark https://www.google.com/advanced_search and you're all set.
I am so glad I found this post via notes, saved it to read later, and actually read through every sentence just now. Dunno why it feels like I am in a secret enclave community meeting organized by the head librarian, on how to run tags around surveillance systems. Lool! thanks would definitely be trying out all of the operators.
Lol, I love everything about this description! Thank you for joining the secret enclave 😆
I also saved it in my "Read later if time" folder but nearly deleted it without reading it. After reading the article I understand what the "secret reference desk" in the title refers to but I initially assumed the article was about unlocking access to an Encyclopedia Britannica set or some other authoritative comprehensive source.
Maybe a title like "Google has a secret librarian to do your bidding" or something like that would attract more attention?
Or maybe it's only me who got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Does Google have a “cut out the mansplaining” function?
Does substack have a "Block every woman who automatically labels every instance of a man expressing an opinion to a woman as 'mansplaining'"?
..
The "mansplaining" tack is so dull and unimaginative.
For what it's worth, I would have made the same suggestion to a man.
😂😂🤣😂🤣❤️❤️❤️
Do kids learn this in school? I am self taught 80 year old and there is so much out there! Lovely to learn new things. I passionately Hate Google and do not use it. AI drives me bats. Thank you for this which I have saved and restacted.
As a school librarian years ago, I used to teach my students 1) how to search e.g.using site:edu or org or com, use of quotations around words, -minus etc., what this meant and then how to evaluate results...e.g. Google rates most popular first, not by best. Not sure what they do now.
Man, we're trying.
Thank you! To eliminate AI responses, I also put -ai in the search bar.
This is such a valuable article - thank you for taking the time to write it up! I use a lot of these every day and completely forget that they’re not common knowledge. The comments are a great reality check. You’ve probably just saved a lot of people hours of frustration. Really appreciate the effort that went into this.
And it was a great nudge that probably my colleagues don’t use these either - and we should revive “tips and tricks Tuesday”
Amazing! I consider myself a pretty savvy searcher, and I know a few useful operators... but this is the FRIKKEN MOTHER LODE.
Thank you.
Wonderful article! Thank you for the time put in to it and the teaching. I’m going to need a cheat sheet to reference 😂
You just gave me a great idea for an infographic! 🙏
Please share if you do!
The New Literacy Project has an infographic with some of the more basic tools you described.
So many good hacks here. I love “can anyone recommend” as a way to get genuine recommendations and not sponsored results. And “askew“ almost makes me miss working in an office…
You've saved me future months of endless research scrolling! Thank you times a million!
What a generous share. Thank you. So much useful information here. This is why I love this platform. And I LOVE the photos of the stacks inside the library-my favorite place to find quiet when I was in college.
Really great list of tools here, some of which I did not know existed! As for Perplexity, I have begun to use it a lot, specifically because it explicitly and plainly provides the hyperlinks for each of its citations, which makes it easy for me to go the original source and do my own thinking.
I will try some of this stuff again in response to your posting. But much of it absolutely does not function for me. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to use text within quotes or use the minus sign to try to remove search terms only to keep seeing the same garbage results.
This will risk becoming a tangent, but the worst offender is Gmail, where I keep turning off AI enhancements that makes search useless, and Google keeps adding more and turning them back on without telling me. The worst offender is searching for 'Dr. Pulao' and getting results for 'rice' because the algorithm is helpfully auto translating foreign words even when they are obvious personal names.
Yep. At some time in the past, Google decided that it would no longer respect the search syntax convetion that had existed for decades. Now we have to use the "Verbatim" tool.
Yes I've noticed the same issues as well.