Basics
What a query is made of. Everything else on these pages narrows or reshapes what the pieces below find.
Exact phrases "..."
Quotes mean those characters, in that order. This is what you want almost every time: source code is punctuation-heavy and order carries meaning.
Combining
Phrases and words can be mixed. Every one of them has to match.
Excluding -
A dash before a word or phrase removes the pages that contain it.
Either one | and grouping ( )
A bar between two words matches pages with either of them, and brackets say what the bar applies to. The bar binds tighter than a space, so the second example below reads as jquery, and either bootstrap or foundation.
"jquery.min.js" | "bootstrap.min.js"
jquery (bootstrap | foundation)
Near each other distance:n
Two words anywhere on a page are often a coincidence; the same two within a
few words of each other usually are not. distance:n between two
terms asks for at most n words between them, in either order.
Useful when two things sit together in the source but you cannot quote the
whole thing, because what is between them varies from site to site - a tag
and its id, a parameter and its neighbour.
"utm_source" distance:5 "utm_campaign"
"data-ad-client" distance:3 "ca-pub"
A loose phrase "..."~n
A tilde and a number right after a quoted phrase let the words inside it move apart, up to n words, and appear in any order. An exact phrase is the same thing with the distance set to zero.
Escaping
A double quote inside a quoted phrase is escaped with a backslash, and a backslash with another backslash. Two backslashes mean one.
That is the whole of the ordinary syntax. The operators narrow a search before it runs, and snipexp: changes what is shown for each result.
Next Operators