It’s something none of us explicitly learned in school. Instead, we learned through doing. Each day over 5 billion searches are run in Google, and many of these are simple queries that require simple syntax. But beneath the surface, the little white search box that the world uses to find information on the internet has a few very powerful secrets up its sleeve.

When Simple Syntax Fails
You’re probably familiar with the ever-present Google search box that appears when you visit Google.com or open a new Chrome tab:

Typically, most of us just type in what we’re looking for in simple language, find what we need, and are done with it. Today, though, I’m looking for a very specific article that a colleague recently mentioned. Unfortunately, simply doing what comes naturally doesn’t pull up what I’m looking for:

A number of relevant hits were returned, but not the specific article my colleague had mentioned. Thinking harder about it, she had said the specific article was a PDF and that it was hosted on some site ending with .org. My memory being what it is, though, I couldn’t remember the name of the site. Adding more detail as keywords to my search, I type:

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