Bing is arguably the world’s second most popular search engine, behind Google. It can be the best alternative if something wrong is happening to Google or maybe Google doesn’t work the way you expected. Just like Google, Bing also presents accurate enough search results.

Search engines like Google and Bing have a web crawler (also called spider) that regularly visits web pages on the internet and indexes the visited web pages according to the applied algorithm.

You can search nearly everything on Bing. But sometimes, Bing presents too many results for certain queries. Especially if the query you entered is too general. For instance, if you are looking for PDF scientific papers about photography licenses, I am pretty sure you will type something like “photography license pdf”. This keyword is great, but there is a better way you can use. There is an advanced search operator that will provide a more specific search results: filetype.

If you type “filetype:pdf photography license” on Bing, all search results presented by Bing will contain a PDF file in the keyword of “photography license”.

Filetype is just an example. There are several other advanced search operators you can use on Bing to narrow down the search results.

1. contains

Filter the results to focus on sites that have links to the file types that you specify.

Example: photography contains:pdf

2. filetype

Filter the results to display web pages created in the file type that you specify

Example: filetype:pdf photography license

3. ip

Finds sites that are hosted by a specific IP address.

Example: ip:103.28.149.206

4. language

Filter the results to display web pages for a specific language.

Example: photography language:th

5. loc

Filter the results to display web pages from a specific country or region.

Example: photography loc:IN

6. prefer

Adds emphasis to a search term or another operator to help focus the search results.

Example: football prefer:history

7. site

Displays only web pages belong to a certain site

Example: site: bettertechtips.com

8. feed

Finds RSS or Atom feeds on a website for the terms you search for.

Example: feed:technology

9. url

Checks whether the listed domain or web address is in the Bing index.

Example: url:bettertechtips.com