Many of us use Google as the main search engine. Whenever you ask a question often you get the answer to "google it". Below is a collction of more or less know tips how to refine your search in Google. I only take credit for putting these thisng togheter.

Bolean Search
AND
With AND google tries to find all the words listed.
Google searching defaults to AND. Therefore...

is the same as...
OR
With OR google will search for either of the terms. For example...
The "|" symbol is treated the same as OR by Google. Thus, this search would yield the same.
If you are sure you want to include one term but also want to include a choice of other terms, you can group your search. For example, the search below is much more powerful search that the similar OR search above. This will look for North Carolina universities or North Carolina colleges:
- (Minus Sign)
The minus will exclude terms from your search. If you want DVDRip divx movies but you don't want to look for aXXo releases:
(works on other search engines as well)

"" (Quotation Marks)
As noted above, if you want to search for an exact phrase such as "Title of the movie" you enclose the phrase in quotation marks.
yields much more directed searches than
* Wildcard Search

You can use the * wildcard to replace any specific words you might have forgotten.

For example assume that you were searching for one of Napoleon Bonaparte's famous quotes "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." What if you couldn't remember all the words?

The result above will still get you with the results you want... without knowing the exact phrase.

Now on to the more refined searches:

Now Google makes it possible to include synonyms in your search. Just insert a tilde or "~" sign in front of your search term.

For example, this search includes all synonyms for "songs" within its search.
Useful for changing the flavor of your search if you are not having good results.

Topic specific searches:
These links will show you how to access this part of google.
Several topics have gotten so broad that google has designed specific searches pages for them. These pages are limited to the topic addressed and should give you more narrowed searches that using the main google search.

http://www.google.com/unclesam - Searches just *.gov and *.mil sites
http://www.google.com/mac.html - Searches just apple related sites
http://www.google.com/microsoft.html - Searches just windows related sites
http://www.google.com/linux - Just searches linux related sites
http://www.google.com/bsd - No, it's not dead! Search BSD related sites only.

Even more advanced:

FREE MP3
People leave music files in unprotected directories all of the time. Here's how to get to them. Come get your free mp3s.
We all need music. If you properly query google, you can find open indexes of music files easily. Here are some hints to get you started.


Using this string we are using the "index of" and the inurl commands to attempt to isolate directories only. The mp3 tag on the end tells google to look for mp3s in these open directories. You can change this to wma or ogg if you wish.


You can add additional search criteria to focus your search more.

This command will find open directories with mp3 files with Pearl Jam. Obviously you can change the band name or file type to better define your search.

FREE MOVIES

Find those hidden directories just full of video files. This will search for avi, mpg, and wmv files.

We'll use the same trick to find open directories. This should find open directories full of video files.

Just add additional search terms on the end if you want to focus your search. Say you wanted to find some starwars clips:

If you want to focus your search further you can even add more and more search terms to limit it to directories:

FREE EBOOKS:

Googe will easily show you all those ebooks that are hanging out there for free! Once you learn google search, you can find anything. Want some ebooks? Oh, yeah... google does that easily. Another power searching lesson coming right up.


What does all of this mean? The -inurl htm and -inul html is attempting to get rid of regular webpages and show just index pages. Looking for index of in the title is doing the same. Using the pipe ( | ) tells google to look for something OR something else. Here were are telling google to look for book or ebook directories... and we have listed several common ebook formats (zip, pdf, chf).

If you would like to look for a particular author or title just tack it to the end of your search.

This uses the same idea but attempts to focus on directories that contain O'Reilly stuff. It's not perfect, but it's better than paying.


If there is enough intresst i could post some more usefull tips and hints for all your google fans out there.