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I have a topic I'm interested in reading about. (DIY hamster toys in this case — but it could be anything.) When I do a Google search there are tons of videos in the results. In my initial phase of research I'd like text and still images only, because videos are time-consuming to skim through, and if I open a lot of video tabs, my browser slows down.

How can I restrict my Google search so that no videos are included in the results?

The most insidious and annoying results I am getting have embedded videos in some of the tutorial steps. These are a resource hog.

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    @pnuts - insidious, embedded videos come up elsewhere, unfortunately.
    – aparente001
    Dec 8, 2017 at 16:53
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    @pnuts - Thanks for explaining your idea. Amazingly, it did eliminate some of the worst offenders. However, I still got thespruce.com/hamster-toys-1238921 which does have a video at the end. But if you write up your idea as an answer, including the explanation you gave, I'll accept it because it's already an improvement over what I was doing. And thank you.
    – aparente001
    Dec 8, 2017 at 22:57
  • @pnuts - I don't understand what you're saying. Checking your idea is part of the responsibility of writing a question and choosing an answer to accept. // Pretty please, will you transfer your two comments to an Answer?
    – aparente001
    Dec 8, 2017 at 23:10

2 Answers 2

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Google Search is geared up to return ‘hits’ that are the same as or similar to search terms. It has so much data that a list of “what I don’t want” rather than “what I do want” would be near infinite or useless. Search has only one exclusion operator (-) and that is mainly for text (ref) though it can be used to negate some other search options, such as site:.

However, though Google knows full well about videos (they can be ‘selected’ as a class) it does not seem possible to exclude them as a class (though, for example, .pdf format may be).

DIY hamster toys -AVI -FLV -WMV -MOV -MP4

seems to be quite effective (though many other video formats are possible) but it does, for me, return a YouTube video on the first page of results, whereas:

DIY hamster toys -site:youtube.com

does not, so seemed worth trying. Hence a Comment, that seems to have proved adequate for OP’s current purposes.

DIY hamster toys -site:youtube.com -AVI -FLV -WMV -MOV -MP4

might work slightly better but comparing the different options for performance would be more work than what the OP is trying to avoid.

The issue of embedded videos (avoiding them) may not be surmountable without code.

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TL:DR; Include filetype:HTML in your search query.

Use the search operator filetype: followed by the file type name or extension. Check out the completed list of file types in File types indexable by Google.

Note the dropdown in the Advanced Search doesn't include the complete list of indexed file types.

The results page might include the related images with labels like Product and Video.

Related Images

Clicking on these images will open a side panel showing a knowledge card with information about the image. In the case of videos, it will show a Watch button.

Knowledge Card

This is different from the results pointing directly to Videos:

  1. Each result is an image; those labeled as Video are thumbnails to advertise the corresponding video, not the video embedding.
  2. The results page space used is much smaller than required by the results pointing directly to videos
  3. They are displayed together as tiles.

Related

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