An Undocumented Google Search Operator

Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results.

For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website.

This “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’

Here are some examples.



Daniel Russell, who first wrote about the AROUND operator, says that AROUND is especially useful when the documents are rather long (think book-length articles) while a comment points out that it could be also be useful “when searching for quotes, speeches or a song that’s stuck in your head, but you can only think of a few words from it.”

Coming back to our original example, a query like “CNN Obama” will mostly show CNN pages that are related to Obama. However, if we modify the query to look like “CNN AROUND(2) Obama,” you get results where these two terms are written in close proximity.

The higher the number, the less the proximity.



Google’s wildcard search operator, represented by Asterisk (Obama * CNN), may achieve similar results but with AROUND, you even get to specify the distance between the two search terms. Do remember to write AROUND in all CAPS else it won’t work.

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