Getting better internet search results with filter operators

Published in 2023-07-20, last edition in 2024-01-13.

As the main search engines evolved into trash-ridden hellholes I've found myself trying harder and harder to get good search results. Most results now revolve around repetitive, bland, dull social media content. Being trapped in digital echo chambers that bury originality and authenticity under gigabytes of digital trash, adware and corporate bullshit is a miserable experience that can be circumvented with basic search engine operators.

The trick involves the commands "-" (hyphen) and "site" to narrow down search engine results. The hyphen (-) operator along with a word/website/domain excludes it from the search results, and the "site" operator narrows the search down to a single website/domain.

If you want to exclude the word "microsoft" from a search about operating systems, for example, just type "operating systems -microsoft" (without the quotation marks) in the search engine and it will exclude all results containing the word "microsoft" in them. Multiple terms can also be excluded from a search as well, you just need to insert those terms in the search along with the hyphen like "operating systems -microsoft -apple". In this last case I excluded the words "microsoft" and "apple" from the results.

Let's suppose you want to search the word "book" for example and want results only from wikipedia.com, you can just write "book site:wikipedia.com" and the search engine will only return results found in wikipedia.com.

Now let's suppose you want to do the same search above but want to omit all results from facebook.com, you can just write "book -site:facebook.com" and the search engine will omit all results found in facebook.com.

Wanna find results about programming only from one domain extension? No problem, just search for "programming site:.net" and the search engine will return only results from websites with '.net' domain.

Wanna exclude multiple websites from your internet search about music? No problem either, just use the command with all the websites you want to exclude like "music -site:facebook.com -site:twitter.com".

Those simple operators can be used in many different ways. They helped me find lots of interesting blogs, journals and personal websites that otherwise would be buried under piles of algorithmic garbage. It works fine on the search engines I tested (Duckduckgo, Yahoo, Bing and Google) and probably works on many others.