Google search results without the dross

Most people have faced the frustration of searching for a good deal on something and failing to find it, because they'd browsed 3 pages of results from  kelkoo, dealtime, nextag and got sick of it.  Businesses don't get off scot free either, with a search for a specific service coming up with scoot, kellysearch, hotfroguk, in fact everything other than the companies you actually wanted to see.

The proliferation of 'directory' type sites which claim to 'help' you find what you want has ironically become the biggest hindrance in searching the web.  I've grown increasingly sick of this, and wondered one day whether there was a way of filtering out all the rubbish from the search results, and thanks to Google, there is!

I first found this via a site called Give me back my GOOGLE™, which makes use of a great Google search option called inurl.  This switch allows you to say that the search results should, or more importantly should not contain a specific word.

I tested this briefly on two different searches, and it's very effective.  For example a Google search for "Dyson DC07" at www.google.co.uk turns up about 202,000 searches.  Of the first 10 (discounting sponsored links and google shopping results) only half were links to a Dyson DC07 you could actually buy, the other half were results from ciao.co.uk, reviewcentre.com etc.

Doing exactly the same search, but using the 'inurl' switch to exclude 29 different unwanted sites I got about 145,000 results, and more importantly every single result on the first page was a Dyson DC07 hoover you could buy!

I tried it again with a google search for +"pc support" +cambridgeshire (if you don't know what the plus signs are for check back next week for 'Tuning your Google searches' blog).  I got 6,100 results, of which 3 were companies who offered PC Support.  Using the inurl switch to exclude 13 directory type sites I got 519 results, and again, every single result on the first page was an IT company, not a directory (9/10 turned out to offer PC Support in Cambridgeshire, one was a web design company).

This is what Google was originally intended to do, find the sites using the search engines list which it would generate from 'spiders' crawling the internet, and web site owners submitting their sites.

Try it, it's very refreshing!  I'll be building up a list of sites which people may want to exclude and publishing it in the next 2-3 weeks once they've been tested.

Comments

[MIke Seddon]

What a refreshing post and excellent advice.

You've just saved me countless hours searching Google for goods and decent review sites.

I'll be very interested in your list of directory sites to exclude although I'm sure I could build up a list over time. Maybe we should compare lists!

Cheers
Mike

[Richard Bartlett]

Apologies! I forgot to link to the article that publishes the sites to exclude. Here it is; http://blog.rbit-consulting.com/2008/10/directory-sites-to-exclude-using-inurl.html

Enjoy, and any comments welcome.