BT Help >  Google Search

Use of Special Characters in Google Search:

1)     Quoted Text [“text”] : To search for a set of words, i.e., phrases type the words in quotes. You will get results matching the exact phrase. Also note here stop words (common words like and, to, for) are not ignored.

E.g.: "If a business does well"

2)     The Plus Sign [ +text ] : This is used in front of a word to force Google to search for a word. Usually this is used in the case of stop words that are ignored by Google when searching for results.

Eg.: Try both Class A Shares and Class +A Shares; see the difference in results.

3)     The Minus Sign [ -text ] : This is used in front of a word to exclude it from the results. This means that you want to exclude pages containing that particular term. This is usually used when you want to narrow down your search results.

E.g.: Suppose you want to search Manx, which has basically two meaning a) a type of cat with no tail, and b) a type of language. Now if you want to exclude references to cat from the results type Manx -cat.

4)     The Asterisk Sign [ * ] : Google uses asterisk sign as a wildcard to match one or more words in a Quoted Phrase.

E.g.: "It's fine to celebrate success * lessons of failure"

5)      The Tilde Sign [ ~ ] : In maths this means “is similar to.” When you put tis sign before a term Google will search for two things. Synonymous and Autonymous words of that query term, and also variations of the query term, i.e. putting “~” before the query term “sell” the results you get are for terms “sell” “auction” “buy” “sales” “seller” “selling” et cetera.

E.g.: ~sell