Many people hope Bing will become a solid competitor to Google because if there is competition, there's quality. This is one of the reasons why the Bing announcement was received so favorably.

After a loud start Bing hasn't done much to improve. Nor did it show its full potential. In fact, even those people that eagerly switched to Bing have no idea about some very cool features the search engine has.

In this post I am sharing 3 unique Bing search operators (and by 'unique' I mean that no other major search engine has it): try playing with them and maybe you'll find them useful!

1. LinkFromDomain:

Ever wanted to see which pages a site links to? Well, no search engine will tell you this except Bing. Yes, this search command is unique and incredibly useful.

Search pattern: LinkFromDomain:anydomain.com

Suggested usage: Well, these are quite a few. I am sure you can think of the ways this search trick may be useful for you. As a search marketer, I personally use LinkFromDomain: operator to see if there are any "shady" pages the site under question links to.

But here's one idea everyone would appreciate: look which sites a great review and how-to site like MUO links to. For example, find all Mac-related pages MakeUseOf authors review and link to:

bing search operators

2. Feed:

This Bing search operators finds RSS or Atom feeds on a website for the terms you search for.

Search pattern: feed:term

Suggested usage: This one is pretty simple and straightforward. I use it as an additional (or alternative) way to find blogs related to my topic because this search finds what Google Blog Search doesn't.

Example: [feed:gadgets]

Bing search opertors

Note: Hasfeed: is similar to the above ones: it finds webpages that contain an RSS or Atom feed on a website for the terms you search for. It can be used like yet one more alternative for your regular blog search.

3. Contains:

This Bing search operators lets you find pages that link to a particular file types.

Search pattern: contains:filetype

Suggested usage: these are plenty, I am sure you will come up with many more ways to use this trick, I am giving just a few examples:

  • Find plenty of pages that link to video files based on the keyword you are interested in [mac contains:wmv]
  • Find all MUO pages that link to video files (optionally, based on the keyword you are interested in) [site:makeuseof.com contains:wmv]
  • Find all pages that MUO links to AND that contain a PDF report based on the keyword you are interested in (are you still following?) [LinkFromDomain:makeuseof.com contains:pdf mac]
search operators Bing

More information on Bing advanced search:

The problem with finding official Bing information on how to use its search operators is that most results I was able to find were too outdated (dating back to 2005-2006) and were basically about MSN/Live.com search engines re-published on bing.com domain.

Here are a few resources that you may find helpful (if you are going to give Bing a try):

Do you use Bing search? If so, what especially do you like about it?

Image Credit : betsyweber