Refine Google searches

There are different ways to filter your Google searches to be more precise or to expand in new directions.

Advanced search

Google offers pages designed to help you perform specialized web and image searches:

Filters & topics

After you perform a search, filter and topic buttons appear near the search bar. They may also appear in other places on the page.

Filters

Filters allow you to narrow results to a particular type, such as:

Video
News
Images
Web

The "Web" filter contains text-based links to websites.

The exact filters and the order in which they appear is dynamic. It's based on what our systems might think are most helpful to your query. If you don't find a particular filter that you want, use the "All" option to check others that are available.

Topics

Topics allow you to add terms to your query that can help you get more specific information or explore related information. Relevant topics for a query are automatically generated and displayed. They're based on what our systems understand about how people search and how content is analyzed across the web. Topics are available on computers for most countries or regions, and they'll expand to more countries or regions and languages on mobile.

Operators

To narrow your results in specific ways, you can use special operators in your search. Do not put spaces between the operator and your search term. A search for [site:nytimes.com] will work, but [site: nytimes.com] won't. Here are some popular operators:

Search for an exact match: Enter a word or phrase inside quotes. For example, [tallest building].

Go to our blogpost for more information about how to search using quotes.

Search for a specific site: Enter site: in front of a site or domain. For example, [site:youtube.com cat videos].

Exclude words from your search: Enter - in front of a word that you want to leave out. For example, [jaguar speed -car].

Related results

After you click a web result and return back to the search results, you may find more related results added to what was originally generated. These added results are related to the web result that you clicked on.

Settings

In Google Search, you can use settings that allow you to match or remove certain types of content:

You can filter Google Search results to different languages with the Language results filter.
You can filter explicit content from your results with SafeSearch.

Related resources

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