Google search operators are special characters and commands — sometimes called "advanced operators" — that extend the capabilities of regular text searches by constraining what Google returns.

The most used operators narrow scope: quotation marks force an exact-match phrase, a minus sign excludes a term, site: restricts results to one domain, filetype: returns only a given document type, and intitle: or inurl: require the term to appear in a page's title or address. Operators combine freely, and OR (or the pipe character) broadens a query across alternatives, so a single search can express logic like exact phrase, on this site, excluding that word.

In practice they turn Google into a research instrument rather than a suggestion engine: auditing how many of a site's pages are indexed, finding guest-post and link opportunities, locating stray PDFs, checking where a phrase has been reused, or surfacing competitor pages that mention a product. Operators are among the few search behaviors that survive algorithm changes, because they constrain the index itself rather than the ranking.