How To Tell A Search Engine What Not To Search For

When you use a search engine do you often find that it delivers too many results? That's why sometimes it pays to tell them what not to search for. There's an easy trick that you can use anytime you want to exclude certain terms from your search query. All you have to do is type a minus sign right next to the term you want to exclude.

To illustrate how this works we'll pretend we're searching for Web pages where the word Mustang appears, but not the word Ford. We're excluding the term "Ford" from our search, in other words.

If we go to a search engine like Google for example, instead of typing this:

Mustang

which yields 75,600,000 results (as of this writing).

We'll type this:

Mustang -Ford

which yields 1,770,000 results.


By typing the minus sign before the term Ford, we're telling Google to list Web pages where the term Mustang appears, but not the term Ford. Still a lot of pages as you can see, but it narrows it down considerably.

Give it a try next time you want to exclude certain terms to narrow down your search results!