Google's Cheat Sheet Reveals A Couple Hidden Syntaxes

Google has released a new cheat sheet at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html . It's a list of syntaxes you can use with Google's search engine, along with some of the specialty offerings like its calculator. And while there are a couple new things here, the list of syntax is not complete. But hey, if it's not complete me and all the other Google-bloggers still have a job, yes?

The syntaxes you may not know here:

Calculator operators -- A list here including an explanation of percentages and rising numbers to a power (2 to the 5th power, etc)

Date:[3,6,12] -- Search only the content that Google has indexed in the last 3, 6, or 12 months. For example Election date:3 would find election results in the last three months -- theoretically. When I tried this it didn't appear to work.

Safesearch: -- Limits a search to filtered sites. Works, some, but what th'? -- Do a search for breasts, and then do a search for safesearch: breasts (neither of these searches are completely work-safe.) The safesearch search does not find some non-safe content, for which I do not fault Google -- machine filtering is notoriously imperfect. However, I *will* blame Google for the fact that an ostensibly "safesearched" search finds sponsored links for pronographic Web sites. C'mon Google, you can't control Web content, granted, but you CAN control your own ads.

There are some Google syntax which are not listed on this page, including:

daterange: -- Allows specific Julian-date searching (instead of last 3,6, or 12 months)

stocks: -- Provides pointers to stock information (stocks:goog)

phonebook:, bphonebook:, rphonebook: -- Phone book lookups.

cache: -- Displays the cache for a given page ( cache:http://www.resourceshelf.com )

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