Bing Advanced Search Tricks You Should Know

Posted 2020-10-07

Bing is one of the world‘s most popular search engines that has gained many fans with its ease of use and accurate search results. Your searches will become even more accurate with these simple Bing search engine shortcuts and advanced keywords. The following advanced search shortcuts will streamline your search results, and narrow down extraneous data so you can get to what you‘re looking for, fast.

 

Symbols you can use to streamline your Bing searches

+: Finds web pages that contain all the terms preceded by the + symbol.

" ": Finds the exact words in a phrase.

(): Finds or excludes web pages that contain a group of words.

AND or &: Finds web pages that contain all the terms or phrases (this is an example of Boolean search)

NOT or -: Excludes web pages that contain a term or phrase.

OR or |: Finds web pages that contain either of the terms or phrases.

Note: By default in Bing, all searches are AND searches.You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted to speed a full-text search.Stop words and all punctuation marks, except for the symbols noted in this article, are ignored unless they are surrounded by quotation marks or preceded by the + symbol.Only the first 10 terms are used to get search results.Because OR is the operator with the lowest precedence, enclose OR terms in parentheses when combined with other operators in a search (search precedence means that Bing evaluates the action of some operators before evaluating the action of other operators).

 

Advanced Bing search operators

The following are simple search tips you can use to narrow down your searches in Bing and make your searches more efficient. 

ext:	Returns only web pages with the filename extension that you specify.

Contains: Keeps results focused on sites that have links to the file types that you specify.

 

Example: tennis contains:gif

Filetype: Returns only web pages created in the file type that you specify. Example: filetype:pdf

inanchor: or inbody: or intitle: return web pages that contain the specified term in the metadata, such as the anchor, body, or title of the site, respectively. Example: inanchor:tennis inbody:wimbledon

ip: Finds sites that are hosted by a specific IP address (A specific address for a computer on the Internet.) . The IP address must be a dotted quad address. Type the ip: keyword, followed by the IP address of the website. Example: IP: 207.241.148.80

language: Returns web pages for a specific language. Specify the language code directly after the language: keyword. Example: "tennis" language:fr

loc: or location: Returns webpages from a specific country or region. Specify the country or region code directly after the loc: keyword. To focus on two or more languages, use a logical OR to group the languages. Example: tennis (loc:US OR loc:GB)

Prefer: Adds emphasis to a search term or another operator to help focus the search results. Example: tennis prefer:history

site: Returns web pages that belong to the specified site. To focus on two or more domains, use a logical OR to group the domains.

 

Example: site:about.com/tennis/US Open. You can use site: to search for web domains, top level domains, and directories that are not more than two levels deep. You can also search for web pages that contain a specific search word on a site.

Feed: Finds RSS (Really Simple Syndication is a publishing format that websites use to easily distribute, or syndicate, content to a wide audience. You can add RSS feeds to an RSS reader to make finding news easier. Some RSS readers are web-based, while other readers are separate downloads that run on your computer.) or Atom feeds on a website for the terms you search for.

Example: feed:technology.

Hasfeed: Finds webpages that contain an RSS or Atom feed on a website for the terms you search for. 

url: Checks whether the listed domain or web address is in the Bing index. Example: url:about.com

Site/domain: Limits your search to a specific root domain, such as .edu, .gov, .org. Example:site/.edu