AllinTitle: A Google Search Operator That’s New to Me
I was perusing my HitTail stream o’ referrers this morning (there’s kind of a zen calm watching the river of referrers go by). Right between searches for “saran wrap but ass” and “george stroumboulopoulos is he gay”, I found this search:
You can probably guess what it’s for, but here’s the official word from Google:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title.
The technical writing is a little ambiguous there. Do they mean the page title, as in the phrase that appears at the top of your browser (and comes from inside the title tags)? Or do they include headings on the page as well?
In any case, I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it’s always handy to learn another search shortcut.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:42 am
They’re referring to the “title” HTML tag.
There’s also an “intitle” restriction, which is similar but doesn’t require that all terms match.
Another useful one is the “site” restriction, which lets you search within a particular domain.
FYI, you might want to encode the brackets around the “title” tag in your post. It’s screwing up the display, particularly in IE.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Thanks for that. Indeed, the ’site’ restriction is always very handy. Will fix that bracket problem.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Thanks for the link to the list of Google operators. That’s really useful to know.
Norlinda
October 11th, 2007 at 8:27 am
it means the words in the title tag.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Why’d you have to post the “stroumboulopoulos” link. I had one of those made you look moments! ha!