Search better with these five shortcuts

Stop typing long, clumsy search queries. Google and DuckDuckGo have a few built-in operators that let you be precise without the trial and error.

First, wrap an exact phrase in quotes. Searching for "moon landing" ensures you only get results containing that specific sequence of words, not just the individual terms scattered across a page.

Second, exclude what you don’t want. Put a minus sign directly in front of a word (like -word) to remove it from your results. You can even exclude a quoted phrase if you need to filter out a longer string.

Third, target a specific site. Use site: followed by the domain, with no spaces. So, site:nasa.gov restricts your search to NASA’s website only. Conversely, using -site:nasa.gov will explicitly exclude NASA results from a broader search.

Fourth, filter by file type. If you know you’re looking for a specific format, use filetype: followed by the extension. filetype:pdf or filetype:jpg works well here, again with no spaces between the colon and the extension.

The real power is in stacking these. For example, if you want to find JPEG images of the moon landing specifically from NASA’s website, you’d combine them: "moon landing" site:nasa.gov filetype:jpg. This cuts through the noise and gives you exactly what you need.