Google provides many tools which can give you great information about the status of your site on their search engine as well as getting stock quotes, maps plus much more.
For example, if you wanted to see how many pages your site has listed on google, you would type into the google search bar the following:
site:craig-edmonds.com
Here are some more handy tricks to get information about your site from google.
Just replace url with your page and domain with your domain name like I have done in the example above.
These first two would probably be the main two google tricks that you would use
- link:url or domain displays other pages with links to the url.
- site:domain shows all listed pages for that domain.
These google tricks are a little more for the advanced user and more seo oriented, especially if you are doing some in depth research into your domain name and keywords.
- related:url same as “what is related” on serps.
- allinurl: shows pages with all terms in the url.
- inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
- allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.
- intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. “intitle:craig edmonds google” finds only pages with craig edmonds in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
- cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.
- info:url will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
- allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
- allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title
Here are some other nifty little shortcuts you can use on the google search bar. The define shortcut is great for finding out the meaning of words.
- define: will give you the meaning of a word or phrase
- spell: will spell check your query and search for it.
- stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.
- filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. “-filetype:pdf” to remove Adobe PDF files.
- maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
- phone: enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same is true for something that looks like an address (include a name and post code)
Not that I don’t trust Google, but I don’t trust mostly anything that modifies my browser. These search bars such as Google’s or Yahoo’s I never install on either IE or Firefox. It seems like they’re prying into your privacy though I guess they would not. Just being careful here.
I know for a fact that there are free applications that attaches executable code to your browser once you install it. If you are not too careful on installing free applications to your desktop, you might be a victim.
Ok I read somewhere that there is a free movie downloader that would get you clear copies of the latest movies. But while it does its supposed task, it also added some code that alters the behavior of your IE browser. Once you search for something on Google or Yahoo, it will alter the results depending on the keywords, and insert its own links on the first page. These links direct you to their sites. I don’t even wanna know what they sell or what happens once you’re on their site. Perhaps they just want traffic. But Yikes!
I think Google and Yahoo bars are ok. I have had no problems with it so far. I have both on my Firefox but I tend to use Google Search Bar more often.