google-like-a-spylisted

# Search operators Operators turn a search box into a filter over a crawled index. The cost is that you are querying somebody's *index*, not the web — coverage, freshness and operator fidelity vary enormously between engines. The mistake beginners make is assuming their query ran as typed. Google routinely drops, stems, and synonym-expands your terms, so a zero-result dork and a silently-rewritten dork look nothing alike but are equally useless. ## Which engine for which job | You want | Go to | Why | |---|---|---| | Broad coverage of mainstream web | Google | Largest index, worst operator fidelity | | Reliable `site:` enumeration, IP/host pivots | Bing | Honours operators more literally; has `ip:` and `contains:` | | Non-Latin script, Russian/CIS/Turkish content, image-adjacent work | Yandex | Different crawl priorities; strongest image matching | | Anonymous querying, quick engine-hopping | DuckDuckGo, Startpage | Proxies other indexes; bangs jump between engines | | Independent crawl (things the big three never indexed) | Mojeek, Marginalia, Brave | Own crawlers, small but genuinely different | | Code, buckets, hosts, archives | Specialised indexes | The general web index never crawled most of it | Never run a dork on one engine only. Different crawlers found different pages, and an engine that never crawled a URL cannot be operator-coaxed into it. Which operator survives where, and where the same operator means something different, is in [reference/engine-operators.md