Google Search Operators - A Complete Guide

Google is great, but did you know that there are secret codes you can input to make it return hyper-specific search results? Best of all, it only takes a few seconds to dial in.

If you’ve never heard of them before, Google Search Operators are simple codes that you can put into the search box to create parameters within your search results. You have the ability to search within a certain site, pages, and even blog titles, allowing you to cut through millions of search results with laser-like precision.

Most people are either unaware that these tools exist, or just don’t care, which provides you with a great opportunity to set yourself apart from the rest. Whereas most people spend hours combing through page after page of SERP results to find what they need, you’ll be able to input a few extra characters and have it “magically” appear at the top of page 1.

Best of all, this information doesn’t necessarily come from some super-secret “hack” that will disappear tomorrow; Google itself wants you to use these tips. They know that if you have a better experience on their platform, you’ll keep using them. That’s why nearly all of this info comes straight from their help desk.

‍What are Google Search Operators?

As stated above, Google Search Operators are alphanumeric codes and symbols that you can put into your search query to limit the search parameters around whatever you choose. You can choose to isolate search terms based on whether or not they’re found in titles, blog articles, or even an entire site.

Most people are more familiar with this than they realize. Inserting quotation marks around a phrase, for instance, will force Google to return an exact match query for that specific phrase, instead of simply looking for all the locations where that combination of words are found. People that do that are using a Google search operator, whether they realize it or not.

Best of all, these codes are given by Google themselves as part of their documentation for their search engine. They want you to use these in your searches because it will produce a more efficient set of search results. And, since Google dominates over 90% of online search engine traffic, if you can become proficient with Google Search Operators, you basically have the entire digital knowledge of the world at your fingertips.

What a time to be alive.

What Kind of Operators Can I Use?

Generally speaking, there are three categories of Google Search Operators: punctuation, Boolean, and advanced search operators, all of which are briefly outlined below.

• Punctuation-Based Operators: The aforementioned quotation marks are a type of punctuation search operator, as are asterisks, dollar signs, and minus and plus signs. Any symbol that you find in your keyboard besides numbers and letters fall into this category.
• Boolean Search Operators: Named for a 19th-century English mathematician, Boolean search operators allow you to combine words and phrases to narrow down your search terms. Words such as "NOT," "AND," and "OR" help you to narrow down your search request by including or excluding certain phrases.
• Advanced Search Operators: Taking your search commands to the next level involves using advanced search operators. These are similar to command-style inputs that put additional conditions on a search query, such as "site:" and "intitle:" commmands.

Two Things to Remember When Using Google Search Operators

Before you start using Google search parameters, there are a couple things to keep in mind. First of all, make sure to not leave a space between the command itself and the search query that you are linking it to. If you're using an asterisk, for instance, make sure that the symbol butts right up against the word itself.

This applies also to advanced search operators. There should be no space between the operator, such as "site:" and your domain name. A search involving your own personal domain, for example, would look like this: site:yourdomainname.com.

Second, all of the three categories listed above can — and should — be used together. This may make the string of characters look more complicated, but it also allows you to get even more granular with your search results than you would otherwise.

This can be utilized to great effect. Say you want to look for articles that contain the word "dog" in the title, but you only want to bring back results that are in PDF or excel format. That search command would look something like this: "intitle:dog filetype:pdf OR filetype:xls." That may look extremely complicated, but if you look at it slower, you can see that it's a rather simplistic way to tell Google exactly what you want to find.

You can see why people have referred to Google Search Operators as “cheat codes” for the online search juggernaut. You can literally drill down to the Nth degree and only return results that match your exact specifications.

What Google Search Operators Should I Know?

You would think that an article like this would list Google Search Operators by the thousands, but Google actually only actively maintains a list of less than 100 in all, including terms for their search engines and other properties, like Gmail and Google Drive. Their engineers are closely monitoring the usage statistics on Google search engine, and will deprecate some when they don't feel like they're being used, or add some based on certain search patterns.

You're not expected to memorize all of them; in fact, it's far better to remember a few of them and then keep a list handy when you need to refer to others. That's why we encourage you to bookmark this page to create an easy reference for yourself.

Complete List of Active Google Search Operators

• “OR” - If you have a series of words that you want to search for, but you don't want to include all of them in the results, use this command. It'll bring up results that have one of the other, but not both.
• Quotation Marks - This is perhaps the one that everyone is most familiar with, but simply putting quotation marks around your phrase will return results that only match those words in that order. This really helps with long-tail keywords, especially if you're trying to determine keyword difficulty.
• "-" - Simply put a minus sign (“-“) before the word that you want to exclude, and Google will automatically remove that word from the search results. You can also choose to exclude certain domains, so if you wanted to search for cats, but exclude PetSmart for whatever reason, it would look like this: "cats -petsmart.com."
• "+" - A plus sign (“+”) is handy whenever you want to include multiple words or phrases together, but not necessarily see them in a group. If you’re building a play area in your backyard, the search term that is looking for both wheelbarrows and playground sets could use a “+”, like the one listed here: "wheelbarrows + playground sets."
• "*" - Technically called a wildcard, and*is used when you're not sure what term you may be looking for. For instance, maybe you are looking for an article that listed the top things to do in hot Springs, Arkansas, but you're not sure what the exact number was. Simply put an asterisk in its place and hit “search,” and Google will find it for you. It should look something like this: "top * things to do in Hot Springs, Arkansas.”
• "Info:" - Typing in "info:" directly before a search URL will return information about the domain that you're looking for. You can find cache information, pages that are similar and yet are still on the same site, as well as external pages that have that URL listed on their content.
• "Related:" - Some of the terms listed on this page provide a unique competitive advantage, such as this one. If you type in "related:" right before your own URL, you'll find pages that have similar content to yours. This helps a lot with finding content gaps, or figuring out who your closest competitors are.
• "Site:" - One of the more common search commands that you can input is the "site:" command. This allows you to search all of the content within a specific site, so it's best used with a search command. It would take you years to find all the information on a vehicle like the Ford F-150 on a site like Car and Driver, but if you type "Ford F-150 site:carandriver.com," it will show all of the relevant links inside the search results.
• "Cache:" - As part of a search audit, you can type in "cache:" right before URL, and you'll be able to find the last time that that page was crawled. This can help you if you're wanting to figure out whether or not it's a good time to update your content.
• "Intext:" - Another competitive edge you can find on your competitors is figuring out how well their sites are categorizing content. Typing a word or phrase after the "intext:" command will show you all the times that those keywords appear in any part of a page's content.
• "Allintext:" - Like "intext:", this command will find the times that your phrase appears inside the text, with the exception that all of the words in your phrase must appear in order. This is better for long-tail keywords, which can be some of the most lucrative keywords on the Internet to target.
• "Intitle:" -  This one is very similar to the above one, with the exception that Google will not force its crawlers to find pages that match every word in the search query; rather, it'll only list a few that you specify. This is better for keywords and short search phrases.
• "Allintitle:" - If you want to find out if there's anybody else that has written content similar to yours, you can type in your search phrase right after the command "allintitle:" and it will show you all the times that that phrase is used in the title of a blog post.
• "Inpostitle:" - Blogs can be a gold mine for market research, so it makes sense that you would want to limit keywords and phrases to not just titles of pages, but titles of blogs themselves. This search term allows you to do precisely that, siphoning through billions of blog pages to find the one that matches your search term exactly.
• "Inurl:" - You may think that this one only matters if you're buying a domain name, but the "inurl" term is especially handy for affiliate marketers who want to set up the categorization on their domains. If you can rank for keywords because they are inside the URL, then you'll have a lot more success yielding traffic.
• "Allinurl" - If you're looking for an exact match on your URL, then you should use the "allinurl" term to limit the search parameters to only those exact words that are in URLs listed online.
• "Inanchor" - Anchor text is the links that appear on pages content that are linked back to other pages, either internal or external. Finding broken links can be a great way to improve your SEO, so if you're looking for keywords that only appear in anchor text, use the "inanchor" term.
• "Allinanchor" - For a more specific query that will find search terms inside of anchor text, use the "allinanchor" term to find exact match keywords and phrases contained only in anchor text.
• "Around()" - For really, really granular results, you can use the "around()" search term to limit search results only when certain words are in a certain proximity around each other. For instance, if you're looking for both birds and parakeets, but you only want results when they're within three words of each other, put those two terms together, separated by "around(3)". The whole term should look like this: "birds AROUND(3) parakeet.”
• "Filetype" - Whether you are wanting to find images, PDFs, or any other specific type of format rather than HTML, you can input it right after you type in "filetype:". This is especially handy if you're looking for downloadable PDFs or lead magnets that are actually crawled by Google, or for long form content like white papers and e-books.
• "@" - Social media is big, but more than that, it's its own search engine. If you're wanting to search inside of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, you can simply type in the "@" symbol, followed by the search network, and it'll pull up all relevant results. Be sure to put the search query before the term, so a search on Twitter for lawnmowers would look like this: "lawnmowers @twitter."
• "#" - Twenty years ago, people would've called that a pound sign, but these days, it's more commonly known as a hashtag. Hashtags are used to identify trending topics, and you can also search for them on Google. The aforementioned search query of lawnmower is really simple: "#lawnmower".
• "$" - Did you know you can also search for prices? If you want to do a quick search to find items that are a certain price, just type in the search query before the price you're wanting to buy it at, such as "Kindle $329". The results will list all the webpages were candles are listed at that price.
• "()" - Similar to quotation marks, parentheses allow you to group multiple terms together to determine how the search is to be conducted. You can put two terms on the inside of the premises, separated by an "AND" or "OR" term, followed by another search term. For Toyota vehicles, a possible search would look go like this: "(Camry AND Corolla) Toyota".
• "Define" - Although you could just put the word directly into Google's search box, putting the word "define" right before it guarantees that the top search result will be the definition, instead of a brand or some other alternate definition that may appear otherwise.
• "Weather" - If you're traveling soon, type in "weather:city" to find out what the weather is in that specific location. Instead of a list of weather-related websites, you'll see an individual snippet at the top of the search results.
• "Stocks" - There are several widgets that you can install on your phone or desktop to give you real-time ticker updates, but if you're just looking for a single stock price, type in the ticker acronym right after the term "stocks:" and it'll appear the top of the result page.
• "Map:" - Local SEO is a whole branch of digital marketing, so knowing how to pull results for a certain location can be invaluable. This is also handy if you're traveling to an area and just want an overview of the entire region, instead of zeroing in on a specific business area. "Map:Dallas", for instance, will show you the entire city of Dallas, instead of just the area around a particular location.
• "Movie:" - Showtimes, info, cast, and possible trailers are all possible by using the "movie:" search term. Use it in conjunction with an upcoming release to find out all the available information that you can.
• "in:" - Ever wondered what 78°F feels like in Celsius? Just type in "78 degrees fahrenheit IN celsius" and you'll have your answer. This term also works with different currencies, weights, and just about any other type of exchange you can think of.
• "Source:" - If you're wondering what a certain publication has to say about a topic, type in "source:domainname.com" and all the times that that brand is mentioned inside the source, it'll be listed inside the search results.
• ".." - Two dots, as opposed to three, allows you to search for a specific range of numbers. If you're looking for wrestling videos from the WCW from the years 1993-1998, just type in "wcw videos 1993..1998" and they'll be listed in all their glory.

Why On Earth Would I Ever Use Those?

As you can see from the list above, Google Search Operators have the ability to take your regular, everyday searches where you use a few keywords and phrases, and turn them into a highly accurate exercise that is laser focused on your goal. It doesn't matter if you are looking for movie times or trying to find a really abstract quote, using search operators can take that otherwise-tedious task that would normally take hours, and make it last a few minutes, at most.

But aside from the simple thrill of becoming more efficient in your Google-fu, there are a few situations in which it makes complete sense — or even absolutely necessary — to use Google Search Operators, especially if you run a business online. Below are a few ways that you can implement these terms in your everyday business life.

To Run a Quick Search Audit

While there are scores of online services that will allow you to run a search audit on your website in seconds, most of those services can cost quite a bit of money, especially if you're just starting out. It may take a little more legwork, but you can do most of the technical auditing work straight from your Google search using just a few Google Search Operators.

For instance, if you just want to know how many of your website's pages are being indexed by Google, you can simply type "site:yoursite.com" into the search bar, and it will show you all the pages that are appearing inside of search results.

Furthermore, if you want to check to see if there are any left over unsecured pages on your website, such as from a recent domain transfer or website migration, you can type in "site:domainname.com -inurl:https", which will take out all of the secured pages in your search results. All the ones that are left don't have a security certificate and should be remedied in order to boost your rankings.

Perform Quick Keyword Research

One of the biggest areas where new digital markers fail is in underestimating the amount of difficulty it will take to rank a new keyword. If your chosen keyword or phrase is on a very authoritative site, it could take you a long time to rank.

If you know that your keyword is semi-popular, you can do a search for it within certain authoritative websites. Typing in "dog training", for instance, inside of PetSmart’s vast catalog of resources is as simple as linking the two phrases together in a search query: "dog training source:petsmart.com". From there, you can see all the articles and pages that mention that phrase.

Finding that keyword inside of titles or blog posts is even easier. Instead of "source:", you can put the keyword in alongside "allintitle:" or "allinposttitle:" and you can see how much content is dedicated strictly to that phrase. While you're more than welcome to still try and rank for the keyword, at least you'll have a more clear understanding of what you're up against.

Help With Content Development

One of the most powerful tactics when it comes to content creation is taking all of the relevant articles that are associated with a certain keyword and writing a mega-article that combines the best elements of each one.

For a hyper-specific keyword though, finding the articles that only relate to that specific idea can be difficult. Putting quotation marks around the phrase is a great start to narrow down your search term, but you should also try implementing it alongside other modifiers, like the plus sign (+) or minus sign (-) where you can add or subtract words, respectively. Searching for them inside titles can also deliver you articles that will allow you to pull information from, as well.

Find Internal Link Opportunities

Creating a roadmap of links inside of your site is one of the best ways to improve your on-site SEO, but finding those internal links can be tedious. Instead, simply type in a keyword next to a “site:” search parameter, and you'll find all the times inside of your website when that exact keyword is used. From there, it's just a matter of manually linking to each one.

For instance, if you run a website devoted to baseball, and you want to create internal links around hitting instruction, just type in "site:yourdomain.com hitting tips" and create a list of pages that appear. From there, go through each one and create anchor text to generate tons of internal links.

You can also use the "anchor:" search parameter to find external links, as well. By linking a keyword with the anchor text, you'll see when those terms are used on other pages only in anchor format. If those links are dead, reach out to the site administrator to replace their’s with yours.

Conduct Competitor Research

We've already talked about how you can use the "related:" term to find sites that are directly related to yours, allowing you to quickly identify your businesses closest competitors. But did you know that you can also run more competitive research, including uncovering the blogging frequency of other websites?

Since you can run a site audit on any website inside of Google, inputting a domain name with a blog subfolder will allow you to detect all of the pages that appear underneath that subdomain. A search like "site:competitor.com/blog" will show you all of the recent blog post, so you can determine a pattern. Dial up the frequency on your own posting schedule, or create more thorough content (if they post a lot) and see if you can outrank them.

On a global scale, you can also find the "categorical hierarchy" of a certain industry by searching which businesses Google considers most authoritative, at least in the online sphere. By taking one of the major businesses in a certain niche, such as Hallmark for greeting cards, and typing it in a related search, Google will automatically list the other authoritative sites directly underneath it.

The search term "related:hallmark.com" for instance, removes Hallmark from a list of possible vendors, and lists someecards.com as number one in the search results, followed by papyrusonline.com as number two. According to Google, these are the two most digitally present businesses in the greeting card niche, right after Hallmark. Begin your competitive research there.

Find Lead Magnets

Many businesses use lead magnets as a way to attract subscribers to their email list, but not everybody wants 100 emails a day coming into their inbox. One way to get to that valuable information that businesses deliver for free is by searching for it in a "filetype:" search. By entering "filetype:pdf write better subject lines", you'll get a list of downloadable documents that you can get for free, often without signing up to a mailing list.

The one drawback to this is that most businesses usually gatekeep their lead magnets behind a password-protected page, or simply choose to un-index the specific pages. This trick won't work for those, but by and large, industries that have massive amounts of long-form content such as e-books and white papers are freely available online, as long as you know where to look.

Find Guest Posting Opportunities

Even though guest posting isn't nearly as powerful as it used to be, it's a still very effective tactic that can create valuable links that will direct users back to your site. Unfortunately, most news organizations bury their contributor information deep down in their site, which can take a long time to find even one piece of contact information, much less several.

Fortunately, you can find all of the available writing opportunities for every industry with a simple Google search. All you need to know is one of the main keywords for the niche that you're targeting, and you can use a search query similar to this one to find all available opportunities, so you can search through them as quickly as possible: keyword intitle:"write for us" inurl:"write-for-us".

Discover Competitor Link Gaps

Having your name or brand mentioned in an article is a golden link opportunity, but for larger brands, it can be nearly impossible to track all the instant sense that you’re mentioned over the Internet. For this reason, if you can find an opportunity that a competitor hasn’t been able to jump on yet, you may be able to twist it in your favor and nab the ever-important link for yourself instead.

All you need to do is perform an “intext” command like this: intext:competitorname -site:competitorsite.com. From there, you should be able to identify all the mentions of a certain brand or name that are not appearing on their own website.

This is useful not only to "steal" links from your competitors, but also that you can find out what other industries your competitors are reaching out to and are associated with. By attaching yourself to the same types of groups, you should be able to generate a similar amount of buzz for yourself.

Find Hard-to-Reach Contact Info

If there's a specific journalist or person that you would like to talk to for whatever reason, it can be hard to find an email address or any other kind of contact information that goes directly to them. Many companies bury their contact information deep on their site (if at all), so unless you're able to connect with them on LinkedIn or something similar, it's usually a dead-end.

Start by inputting the competitor's website into the search bar (site:domainname.com) and then put a keyword right after it, followed by the authors name in quotation marks. All in all, it should look something like this: site:domainname.com keyword "author's name". Actually reaching them as a separate matter though, since many people have spam filter set up on their inboxes, but it's as close as you'll get to reaching them without meeting them in person.

If a direct email or phone number isn't available, you can also reach them through their social media by using the OR command. Try "author name site name (site:linkedin.com OR facebook.com).

Can I Only Use Google Search Operators on Google’s Search?

Many people forget the fact that Google not only owns their massive online search giant, but this bunch of subsidiary services as well. Their massive email service, called Gmail, boasts nearly 2 million active users, which is by far the largest email service in the world. They also own Google drive, which has approximately 1 billion active users and generates nearly $3 billion worth of revenue every year.

You won't be able to search any data that you don't own under your own accounts, since doing so would be a massive security reach, but you can still siphon through years and years of your own accounts to find information. Or, if you'd like to find certain types of emails, you can do that too. Below are some of the most common search queries used for Google’s respective services.

Google Mail

• From: - In case you'd like to find a message that was sent from a specific person or email address.
• To: - In case you'd like to find a person that you sent a message to through your email service.
• CC: - Used to find a recipient that was attached to an email.
• BCC: - For finding somebody that was blind copied onto an email.
• Subject: - If you know the specific keyword that you're looking for, you can search their subject lines for it using this query.
• {} - If you don't want to use the OR function, you can put it in brackets instead. This will separate multiple phrases or words to find all the messages that used any combination of them.
• AROUND - Just like in the regular Google search function, you can use AROUND to search for keywords that are in a certain proximity to each other. Input it in the same way that you would the regular search bar.
• Label: - Some people like to label their messages with certain words. If that's you, you can search by those labels here.
• Has:attachment: - If you know that your email has a certain attachment in it, you can search using the attachments name by using this function.
• Has:youtube: - Since Google owns YouTube, you can also search your messages for any embedded videos or links to YouTube as well.
• List: - Most of the emails that are in your inbox will probably come from mailing list, so use this function to sort through the different senders.
• Filename: - If you can't remember anything else about a message except what the filename was, you can also search by that.
• In:anywhere: - Though a regular search will usually accomplish this, you can also look for other bins inside your email service, such as spam or the trash.
• Is:important: - Any messages that have been labeled as important can be searched using this term.
• Is:snoozed: - Any snoozed messages can be searched this way.
• Is:unread: - All unread messages can be searched by using the "is unread" search query.
• Is:read: - Just like the one above it, all read messages can be searched as well.
• Older: - If you know that your message came before a certain date, simply input the date right after the older: search term to limit your search to only those dates.
• Newer: - On the other hand, if you know your message was definitely not before a certain date, you can limit your search to only newer messages.
• Is:chat: - Google's chat function inside of Google messages is pretty robust, but it's hard to organize sometimes. Search for messages inside your chat windows this way.
• Deliveredto: - Any messages that were safely delivered can be searched here.
• Category: - If you have categories listed on your email, you can input the category name after the colon to find messages inside that category.
• Size: - Type in the file size after the colon to look for messages that are larger than a certain size. Measured in bytes. Alternatively, typing in "larger:" accomplishes the same purpose.
• Smaller: - Any messages that are smaller than a certain size can be also be searched here.

Google Maps

• "Business Type" - No matter what type of business you're looking for, you can input the genre inside of quotation marks in Google maps and will return all businesses that meet that specification in the immediate area.
• Near - This is the one most people use, but it accomplishes a similar task to the one listed above. Typing in "coffee shops near me" will return a geo-located search with coffee shops in your immediate area.

Google Drive

• Owner: - Google drive allows you to set up a variety of different permissions inside your account, so if you're looking for a file that is owned by a specific person, simply put their name after the colon with the search term.
• After: - Similar to Google mail, you can search for files in your Google drive folder that were added after particular date.
• Before: - You can also search for files in your drive folders that read it before a certain date to.
• Type: - If you know what type of file it is, you can also search your Google drive folder by file type.
• Source:domain - Shared folders can also be searched. Put your domain name after the colon, and you can search all the files that come from that source.
• To: - If you remember what person you shared the file with, you can search by that as well.
• Title: - Use the keyword that you know is associated with the file type, and put it after the colon to search the titles of all the different files in your Google drive.
• Is:trashed - Google drive keeps your files that are in the trash bin for certain period of time, but before it's emptied, you can do a search just for the files that are in the trash bin.
• Is:starred - Files that have been starred can also be searched, no matter what folder they’re in.

FAQ About Google Search Operators

Can I Use Google Search Operators With Other Search Engines Like Bing and Yahoo?

Even though more than 90% of the online search market is dominated by Google, Bing and Yahoo also have their respective portions as well. And, like Google, they both have advanced search mechanisms allow you to dial in your search results with laser-like precision.

Although most of the command strings will be nearly identical to the ones found in Google, other search engines have unique identifiers that are all their own. Bing, for instance, allows you to search for specific IP addresses by inputting a simple "IP:" command. Also, Yahoo lets you use "definition:" to find the meaning of a word, rather than just "define:".

Depending on which search engine you use, it's a good idea to become familiar with the main ones that will help you new search, or just download a list of all the active ones and keep it handy. You'll find that Bing and Yahoo will have several of the same ones as Google, but not nearly as thorough of a list.

I Just Got a Spam Warning From Google After Inputting a Search Operator. Is That Normal?

Because Google cares so much about security, it is possible to get a spam warning after inputting several search operators in a row. Don't worry though, all they'll ask you to do is fill out a simple CAPTCHA form. Once you do that, you'll be on your way.

The main thing that Google is trying to prevent is lots of unqualified traffic heading to a certain location to influence search results. Filling out a simple security form lets them know that you're legitimate.

Does the Order Matter in a Search Query?

Although Google is very specific with certain things, such as not putting a space in between a word and the colon, they are much more laid back when it comes to other technicalities. For instance, in almost every case, it doesn't matter what order you put the words or the command strings in during a search query. Any order that you type them in will achieve the same purpose.

The only time that it matters is if you are trying to separate or combine groups of words using the OR command or the AND command. In this case, you want to separate those from the rest of the command string with parentheses so that Google knows which keywords to focus on.

Is There a Limit on the Amount of Words I Can Put Into a Single Search Query?

Absolutely not. Remember, more than 60% of all search terms that are put inside Google search query are long-tail keywords, which means the more words you have, the more detailed your question is in the more detailed the responses will be.

The same methodology applies for Google Search Operators. You can string as many of these commands together as you like to narrow down the search results, but you shouldn't need more than three or four for most searches. Narrow down too far, and I only have a few searches total to look through.

One of the areas of this comes in really handy as for plagiarism checks. You can use the "allintext:" command along with part of a sentence that you wrote to see if it's been copied on other sites. If you find that it has, send an email to ask them to take it down.

Do Deprecated Search Operators Still Work?

As you can imagine, Google is constantly trying to improve and refine their search engine. What that means is that, depending on when you read this guide, certain terms may not work anymore, since Google may have deprecated them due to lack of use.

But just because they’re deprecated doesn't mean that they will never work. Many people have sporadic success using search operators that Google claims has long since been defunct. It's not something you should hang your hat on, but if you can't think of any other way to refine your search, it's worth trying deprecated terms to see if they are still somewhat active.