Google Search Operators

Exact Phrase: returns results with your search term exactly as you type it.
To use it, enclose your search term in quotes, i.e. “Prime Minister’s salary”

AND/OR: used with multiple search terms, it returns results containing all (AND) or any (OR) of
those terms.
To use it type AND or OR between your terms, i.e. Holyrood AND Westminster or Holyrood
OR Westminster

Site search: return results from one specific website.

To use it, enter the website domain excluding the http://www part after site:, followed by your
search terms i.e.site:parliament.uk “funding shortfall”
Note: you can use the Exclude operator to exclude results from a specific site as well, for
example -site:bbc.co.uk would filter out results from the BBC.

Exclude: return results which do not include specified terms. To use it, prefix your term with a
minus sign (-), no space. i.e. “Scottish independence” -Salmond

Wildcard (sometimes called Proximity): this gives Google some flexibility around your search
terms and lets it fill in some blanks. To use it, place an asterisk (*) in the relevant place in your
search, i.e. email * @northlan.gov.uk

Filetype: returns results contained in specific kinds of file like PDFs. To use it, type filetype:
followed by the type of file you want to return, i.e. filetype:pdf
Note: This is particularly useful in combination with the site: operator. Google Support has a list
of searchable file types here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en

Related: returns a list of thematically similar websites. To use it, type related: followed by a
domain name, i.e. related:bbc.co.uk

Intitle: returns web pages with your search term in the title. To use it, type intitle: followed by
your keyword, i.e. intitle:Carillion
Note: this is another one that works really well with the site: operator
Note 2: inurl: also works, which will return results where your search term is in the URL string.

Synonym: returns results which have synonyms for your search terms. To use it prefix a term
with a tilde (~), i.e. “Prime Minister” salary ~salary

AROUND(): returns results with occurrences of words within a maximum range of words. To use
it, type AROUND(X) between two search terms, but replace X with the maximum number of
words you want to allow in between them, i.e. “Prime Minister” AROUND(5) “Downing
Street”

Twitter Search Operators

from/to: returns tweets sent from or to a specific user. To use it, prefix the username
EXCLUDING THE @ SYMBOL, with either from: or to:, i.e. from:kevingilmartin or
to:neilhimself
Note: these are best used in combination with each other or with other search operators

near: will return tweets near a specified city or town. To use it, prefix the place name with near:,
i.e.near:Glasgow
Note: location data is mostly inferred from IP addresses and cell towers, so may not always be
100% accurate

Date range search: returns tweets sent after or up to a given date. To use this one, prefix a
date in the big-endian format with either since: or until:, i.e. since:2021-01-41 or
until:2021-02-28.
Note: you can combine both of these to specify a start and end date for your search.

-RT (Hootsuite only): when you have a search column in Hootsuite, you might find a lot of
retweets of popular posts clogging up your results. You can add -RT to your search to exclude
retweets from your results.

Hootsuite Search
Note: this part assumes a little bit of basic knowledge about Hootsuite. We cover this in the NUJ
Scotland Social Media: Advanced course, but the dashboard is quite intuitive and a few minutes
of playing around with it and watching YouTube should get you going.

To set up a search stream in Hootsuite, press the Add Stream button at the top
Select your social media platform on the left, then choose “Search”, and select your social
media profile from the menu.

Type your search query in the box (in this example I have included the -RT operator above), and
click Add Stream.

Hootsuite Geographic Search

Hootsuite’s geographic search allows you to search on specific coordinates lifted from Google
Maps.
Follow the search process as above, and in your search query box, enter geocode: followed by
the coordinates from Google Maps.

Remember to remove the space, otherwise the search won’t work. So you should end up with
something like this: geocode:55.86238221807154,-3.990256779582365

Now you need to add your search radius in kilometers. Again, making sure to exclude spaces,
separate the coordinates and distance with a comma, so you’ll end up with:
geocode:55.86238221807154,-3.990256779582365,10km

You can either search just on this string or you can now insert a space and include keywords if
you want to search an area for something specific.

Google Alerts
Bring new Google search results to you in your email with Google Alerts. You need a Google
account, which can be set up using an existing email address; you don’t need to set up a new
Gmail address.

Once you’re signed in to your Google account, go to www.google.com/alerts, where you can
use keywords and the search operators we discussed earlier to set up alerts which will come to
you in your email.
Image Searching on Google Lens
If you want to find out information about someone or something in a photograph and have no
other context, Google allows you to do a reverse image search. On the Google homepage, click
Images in the top right.

The Google search bar will change to the Google Images bar, and you’ll see a camera icon on
the right.
Clicking on this will allow you to either upload an image or enter the URL of an image you want
to search on.

Scrape anyone’s tweets to Evernote

If you want to keep a record of anyone’s tweets, even after they’ve been deleted, you can use
automation service IFTTT to scrape them to online note taking service Evernote.

You need an account for IFTTT and Evernote. Evernote has a free option, and IFTTT has a
limited free version, but the monthly fee is only $3.99 a month.
Allow Twitter and Evernote to speak to IFTTT, and set up the Twitter trigger “IF New Tweet by a
specific user”

Then choose the Evernote action “THEN Append to note”

You can change the title to something more specific if you want. Don’t change anything in the
body. You can change the notebook name if you want.

Email Searches
Most email clients will allow you to search using operators as well. Gmail and Outlook are the
most common, but these searches should work pretty much anywhere:

From: followed by the name or email address of the person who sent you the email you’re
looking for
To: in your sent items folder, followed by the name or email address of the person you sent the
email to
Subject: will find any emails with the search word in the subject line

Gmail has quite a lot of search operators, many which are specific to itself. Google support lists
them here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en-GB

Some final tools to be aware of, which may prove useful

Wayback Machine: archives the web and can be searched for old versions of webpages, even
if they no longer exist
URL: https://archive.org/web/

Trendsmap: gives you a 7 day, hour-by-hour history of trending hashtags, users and words
anywhere in the world.
URL: https://www.trendsmap.com/

Yandex: an alternative search engine which tends to give better image search results and
reverse-image searches.
URL: http://www.yandex.com

Wikipedia Simple English: one of the language options on Wikipedia is Simple English. It’s not
available for every entry, but for many pages dedicated to complex scientific topics, you can
change the language to Simple English to get the same topic delivered in layman’s terms. To
switch to Simple English, look at the URL. It’ll look like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

The “en” part is the language. So just delete that and replace it with “simple”:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

The stuff we don’t do demos of…

The Surface Web is anything indexed by Google and other search engines, but you may have
heard mention of the deep web and dark web.

Deep Web: anything not indexed by a search engine, can include stuff like movies on Netflix,
your smart fridge, and other commercial services. Also includes…
Dark Web: this is the part of the web that you need very specific software to access, and most
of us will never have a need to. If your work or investigations take you to a point of requiring
access to the dark web, please do your research first.

Look into the Tails operating system, the TOR browser and the appropriate firewall settings.
These things are all legal and freely available, and safe if used correctly, but again, do the
research first and you’ll want to make sure you’re hiding your location via a VPN.

You may also want to take a deep dive into something called OSINT - Open Source Intelligence.
There are many free tools out there that can be used to access a wealth of publicly available
data and information about people and organizations. There are a few Introductory OSINT
courses on LinkedIn Learning, and there’s a huge repository of tools to found at
https://start.me/p/b5Aow7/asint_collection. A lot of these are specifically American, but it gives
you an idea of what’s available and what to look for in UK tools.

Paywalls

We also looked at paywalls, and a few methods which can sometimes work to peek through
them. Different methods work for different paywall setups and we looked specifically at viewing
the source code and using a facebook redirect in Incognito Mode.

I’m not going to put the specifics down in writing here, but any of the methods we used will be
found with a quick search on google or youtube.

I will remind you about how to search and save source code, though. It’s as simple as
right-clicking and selecting the option that says something along the lines of “View Page
Source”. Then you can use your browser’s Search or Find option (Ctrl/Cmd+F in Chrome) to
jump to the start of the article copy. You can then scan the code until you find the end of the
article, copy and paste that section into a Notepad or plain text editor. Go to File >> Save As
and change the file type to All Files. Save your document with whatever name you want and ad
.html at the end.

You should now be able to open your saved file and read the full article. Please note, the NUJ
does not encourage or endorse the use of these methods, but as part of your research training
it’s an important thing to be aware of as a last resort. Please always support and pay for access
to quality journalism when required.