There's no denying the power of Google search operators. With just a little added effort, you can make sure that you're finding exactly the content you're looking for---and one way to do that is to exclude results from sites that you don't care about.

How to Exclude Keywords in Google Search Results

When it comes to excluding specific keywords or items from your search results, all you need to do is place a hyphen in front of the word without a space.

So if you wanted to search for articles about macro lenses for photography but didn't want anything about Nikon, you would use the following search query:

"macro lenses -nikon"

How to Exclude Domains in Google Search Results

If you're more interested in excluding specific sources, there are two ways you can do this.

The first method is identical to excluding keywords. If you're searching for links about Raspberry Pi but don't want any Wikipedia links, you could just use:

"raspberry pi -wikipedia"

The problem with this method is that if an article on another site mentions Wikipedia in their article, that link will also be excluded from your search results, and that's not what we want.

Instead, the second method is to use a search operator that specifically excludes URLs. The query would then look like this:

"raspberry pi -site:wikipedia.org"

Using this method, you can also exclude subdomains or specific webpages and still get results from other subdomains and other webpages on the same domain.

These Also Work on Other Search Engines

If you prefer not to use Google, these search operators work on other major search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo.

While Google Search Operators come in really handy as you're searching on the web, don't forget that you can also take full advantage of these features when using other Google products including Gmail and Google Drive.