Behind the unassuming Google interface, you’ll find a host of useful tricks to help you zero in on what exactly you want to find. Looking for an obscure recipe or rare photo? This guide will help you track it down.

1. Include and exclude keywords

Google has to match any word preceded by a plus and exclude any word preceded by a minus. Keywords that lack a preceding symbol are considered important but not essential. For example, search for +Chicago +coffee -Starbucks to make sure you see results for non-Starbucks coffee shops in Chicago. Running that search without the symbols would bring up a significantly different list of results. You could also search for dolphins -Miami -football to look up aquatic mammals without seeing any mention of the football team. While we’re talking about symbols, don’t forget quotation marks. Put these around any specific phrase you want to find. If you’ve had the song lyric “go out and buy a brand new pair of shoes” playing over and over in your head, you’ll need quotes around those words to find out it’s from Maggie M’Gill by The Doors. Without quotes, you’ll get an assortment of other results, mostly about, well, shoes.

2. Search within websites

Google also lets you search within a top-level domain. Say you’re trying to look up technical scientific information—you’ll probably find more reliable results on a university or government website than you might see on a random blog. So add site:.edu to your search query to limit results to university websites. Or if you want the US government’s take on space information, add site:.gov. Let’s say you want to find what Popular Science has written about frogs. Simply go to the Google homepage and search for frogs site:popsci.com. The results will only include pages from the specified site, and Google will apply its usual weighting, so you’ll see the most relevant hits first (based on factors such as how many other sites link to a page, and its timeliness). When you need to find something on a particular website, this trick often works better than that site’s own built-in search option. Try combining it with the keyword manipulations we mentioned above to narrow your results even further.

3. Limit the time period

After you’ve run a search on the main Google search engine, click Tools, then the Any time drop-down menu to limit the results to more recent hits. This tweak is helpful for focusing on more recent stories. On the other hand, if you want to look for archived news that has since been replaced by more current stories, you might want to specify a date range. Choose Custom range, and plug in start and end dates.

4. Find files

Google’s search results mainly concentrate on webpages, but it also indexes publicly available files. You can look for them using a filetype: command at the end of your normal query. So looking for report filetype:pdf will return PDFs with “report” in the title. Try report filetype:xlsx to do the same for Excel spreadsheets. This also lets you search for images, though Google already has a handy image search tool. Remember, this will only work for publicly available documents and files uploaded to the web. You’re not going to suddenly come across some secret government files… or at least we hope not.

Some of the operators, such as specific phrases, will be familiar by now. But the extra region and language options can be helpful. By default, Google prioritizes hits from the country or continent you’re currently in, so you can use these settings to get better results for the rest of the world. The advanced search page is also worth visiting if you forget one of the tricks we’ve mentioned above, like searching on a certain site or excluding keywords—or doing both at the same time. Once you’ve typed in all your parameters, click Advanced Search to see what you can find. This story has been updated. It was originally published on June 12, 2017.