How to get better Google search results

Google Search Tips: eliminate results you don't want

— How to get better Google search results —

Fifth in a series of Google search tips.

Read them all:

Sometimes Google finds too much. You look for information about making a carrot cake and it gives you seven million results. That’s overwhelming.

Searching Google for how to make a carrot cake: 7 million results!

Maybe you want to make a carrot cake for your friend who doesn’t like raisins. You don’t want to search through seven million articles, looking for the ones without raisins. Turns out it’s easy: if you want to exclude something from your search, put a minus in front of it, like so:

Google search results, excluding those with raisins (via minus sign)

Now we’re down to 1.8 million results.

Maybe your friend is allergic to butter (poor thing). You’ll need a recipe without butter. That’s easy– put a minus sign in front of the word “butter” and you’re all set.

Note: put a space in front of the minus sign, and no space after. Them’s the rules.

Google search for how to make a carrot cake, no raisins, no butter

By excluding raisins and butter we’re down to 1.4 million results. But we can narrow things down further by putting our original search term (how to make a carrot cake) in quotes. Putting things in quotes tells Google you want those words, in that order, and ideally with that exact phrase.

Google search improved by putting search string in quotes

Notice how the search results are all titled “How to make a carrot cake” or some variation on the phrase– but always, the words are in that order.

The quotation marks get Google’s results down to 29,400 items. But we can do better yet! If you’d rather read about making carrot cakes than watch someone else make one, you’ll want to eliminate the videos. That’s easy: it’s our old friend the minus sign again, and the word “video.”