Basics

What a query is made of. Everything else on these pages narrows or reshapes what these five things find.

Several words means all of them, in any order, anywhere in the page source.

Quotes mean those characters, in that order. This is what you want almost every time: source code is punctuation-heavy and order carries meaning.

Phrases and words can be mixed. Every one of them has to match.

A dash before a word or phrase removes the pages that contain it.

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.