How good are you at finding the results you want using search engines? Advanced search operators can really be useful to narrow search results and keep your hair from falling out trying to weed through irrelevant results.

These are simply the most useful commands I have found helpful along with a little legend indicating which of the big three search engines these tips work on.

The results obtained with link related commands are often somewhat incomplete. Live search currently allows the +link command but this can change at any time. Google displays select links only and Yahoo includes more linkdomain and link data than the others.

There are other advanced search operators available, I just don't use them much. Here are the links to each engine's respective page. What do you find useful when sifting through SERP's looking for just the right results?

Advanced Google Search Operators

Yahoo has provided an Ajax interface (Search Assistant) for search suggestions since September 1995. Now Google is forcing their version of search suggestions including a result count into the equation.

Google's version is, in typical Google fashion, quite plain, but very effective. It's fast too.

C'mon Google, give me an easy way to turn this thing off if I want to go back to my browser saved queries! I can't even turn it off in Preferences.....

MSN search has become somewhat weird for months now with cloaked "traffic" followed by bots to weed out page content cloaking and they seem to be falling even further behind on the information side of the equation for webmasters, which to me is a really bad idea.