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I want to be able to tell Google
if [some string] is in the URL, don't include as a search result
For example:
If I want to do a search for "popcorn", the first thing that comes up as a result is www.thepopcornfactory.com. How can I tell it
if 'popcorn' is in the URL, exclude that result
I checked the advanced search, couldn't find that option. Anyone know a search engine that allows this?
It doesn't seem to be possible with Google. In the paragraph about the site operator, GoogleGuide says,
You can use many of the search operators in conjunction with the basic search operators +, –, OR, and " ".
but it doesn't seem to work for the inurl operator.
The following works for one specific site:
popcorn -site:thepopcornfactory.com
You could string together all the sites you don't want (which is how I use it), but that's hardly optimal and only works on the domain name, not the entire URL:
popcorn -site:thepopcornfactory.com -site:popcornhour.com -site:popcorn.org
As partial domain matching seems to be limited even for Google's Custom Search, I suspect that this might be a limitation of the way they keep or access their index. So above may be the only way, unless someone else knows more.
Google allows this if the [string] you're trying to exclude needs to be excluded only when it occupies a whole "word" of the URL. So for instance you can exclude thepopcornfactory.com sites with
-inurl:thepopcornfactory
but that won't exclude en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn or www.popcornopolis.com. Using:
-inurl:popcorn
similarly won't exclude thepopcornfactory.com or www.popcornopolis.com
