Google+ Search Operators Wish-List

Posted: Wednesday, 19th October 2011 in Blog, Tech
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

It’s great to have Search now working on Google+ but the feature-set is very basic. Ideally we need more advanced operators to aid us searching through the huge amount of content not on the service. The likes of Twitter and FriendFeed give you a great selection of advanced search options. The following is what I’d like to see on Google+

General content operators

intitle:[text] - return entries with specific words in the entry description
incomment:[text] - return entries with specific words in the entry’s comments
comments:[num] - return entries with at least this many comments
commentby:[user] - return entries that have been commented on by a specific user
plusones:[num] - return entries with at least this many +1s
plusoneby:[user] - return entries that have been +1′ed by a specific user
source:[sourcename] - return entries from a particular service, for example: source:mobile or source:plusone or source:youtube
circle:[circlename] - return entries from a specific circle (obvously only for your own view)
from:[username] - return entries from a specific user, for exmaple: from:bret

For [user] have the option to enter “me”, e.g. from:me, to share for posts by yourself. This is useful as it allows you to share saved searches to others by personalising the search for them. For other users it’s going to have to pup-up with the dropdown box to select them. As we don’t have user-friendly usernames it would be a pain to enter our profile IDs, e.g. from:104405539079062799451. So it could work just like the Circles box on the share box.

Best of

bestof:all - filtered for best of posts all-time
bestof:day - filtered for best of posts for the last 24 hours
bestof:week - filtered for best of posts for the last 7 days
bestof:month - filtered for best of posts for the last calendar month

Or simply use the following with the combination of the date operators:

bestof:[yes/or] - filtered for content that meets the ‘best of’ criteria

Dates and times

date:[date] or date[anytime/pastday/pastweek/pastemonth/pastyear] - return entries in a specific date range
datefrom:[date] - return entries after a specific date
dateto:[date] - return entries before a specific date
daysfrom:[num] - return entries after a specific number of days from current date
daysto:[num] - return entries before a specific number of days from current date

timefrom:[time] - return entries after a specific time
timeto:[time] - return entries before a specific time

hoursfrom:[num] - return entries after a specific number of hours from current time
hoursto:[num] - return entries before a specific number of hours from current time
minsfrom:[num] - return entries after a specific number of minutes from current time
minsto:[num] - return entries before a specific number of minutes from current time

Type of content

withimage:[yes/no] - filtered for posts content an image
withvideo:[yes/no] - filtered for posts content a video
withlink:[yes/no] - filtered for posts content a link

How shared

reshare:[yes/no] - filtered for posts that have/have not been reshared
public:[yes/no] - filtered for posts that have/have not been shared to public
public:[yes/no] - filtered for posts that have/have not been shared to extended circles
hangout:[yes/no] - filtered for posts that are/are not hangouts

The date and time operators are a nice-to-have and might need tweaking but I’m very keen on the rest. What search operators or search features would you like to see on Google+?

Previous post on FriendFeed’s very useful search operators:
https://plus.google.com/104405539079062799451/posts/YcmU6WqhdED

Feel free to suggest any more in the comments below or any thoughts on the suggestions above.

If you like please reshare and +1 this post, the direct URL is:
https://plus.google.com/104405539079062799451/posts/e5RoR9rW2rV

Comments
  1. [...] Google+ Search Operators Wish-List (koltregaskes.wordpress.com) [...]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s