Google Allows Special Syntax Mixing

One of my complaints about Google for the last several whatevers is how limited the special syntaxes are. In the past you could not "mix" special syntaxes -- you couldn't use more than one at a time. Apparently Google's fixed that, or I've just figured it out.

Let's go to the examples. Say I want .edu pages about Mae Jemison. Google now allows the following search:

allintitle:"mae jemison" site:edu

Once you've gone past two syntaxes you have to be careful what syntaxes you use to do the searching. allintitle: and allinurl: can cause search errors. Instead, use intitle: and inurl: instead. I've found in my experimenting that they work much better. This query actually works now:

intitle:mae intitle:jemison inurl:mae site:edu nasa

This also answers Richard Seltzer's complaint (see Slashdot article at http://slashdot.org/features/02/03/12/1735224.shtml?tid=95 ) about not being able to get a listing of all the pages in his domain. This query works:

inurl:samizdat site:samizdat.com

Note that not all syntaxes seem to like mixing. link: doesn't appear to mix with anything else. I'll be running some more experiments on this and I'll update you if I learn anything else.

Posted to Search Engines-Google | TrackBack