Google employees Gary Illyes and Lizzie Harvey have published a new guide to search operators.
The new document differs from the existing one in that it focuses more on using these commands to debug the site, states SearchEngines.
At the same time, the document contains the following note:
“Because search operators are bound by indexing and search restrictions, the URL validation tool in Search Console is more robust for debugging purposes.”
The list contains the following operators:
- site: – allows you to get results for a specific domain, URL or URL prefix;
- cache: – finds the saved version of the page;
- related: – allows you to find sites with similar content. Google identifies related pages by comparing several factors, such as the entities referenced on the page and the general category it belongs to. It is noted, however, that the small number of URLs from the site obtained in the search results using this command does not say anything about the quality of the pages. This metric is usually determined for the most popular pages. In addition, the related: statement is not updated in real time, so recent popular URLs may be missing from search results, says NIX solutions.
- src: – allows you to find pages that contain a specific image url.
- imagesize: – allows you to find images with specific dimensions.
Regarding the limitations of the operators mentioned in the note, in a discussion on Twitter, Illyes explained it this way:
“Unfortunately, all search operators are heavily influenced by the limitations of our systems for retrieving information. It is less noticeable on large sites. “
He stated this in response to a question in the comments. The author of the question noticed that there were no search results for [imagesize: 1200×800] in the new document as an example. Instead of this query, Illyes suggested using the following query: [imagesize: 1200×600 site: http: //wikipedia.org].