3 Easy Ways to Exclude Certain Words from Google Search

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A quick guide to make Google search exclude multiple words or specific phrases for better results

Co-authored by Tyrone Showers and Nicole Levine, MFA

Last Updated: December 18, 2023 Fact Checked

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Excluding One Word

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Excluding Precise Terms

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Excluding Specific Websites

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Troubleshooting

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Expert Interview

Is the Google search results page not showing you what you need? Since Google is so vast, the search engine can have trouble understanding your exact needs without a little help. Luckily, it'll just take a few symbols and phrases to get your Google search to yield better and more refined results. This wikiHow will show you how to exclude a word, term, or website from the Google search engine.

Things You Should Know

Use a minus sign to exclude a word. For example, search: best laptops -HP.
Use a minus sign and quotations to exclude a phrase. Search: best laptops -"budget laptops".
If using the minus sign doesn't exclude a word or phrase from the results, try the advanced search form or exclude additional words.

Method 1

Method 1 of 4:

Excluding One Word

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1
Use - to remove a specific word from the search results. When there's a minus sign followed by a word, Google Search knows to ignore any results containing that word.^{[1]
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- For example, if you want to search for "best laptops" and exclude certain models, input the following search:
  - best laptops -HP
- If you want to include more than one exclusion, add another minus sign with the word or phrase. Be sure to include a space between each. This will look like:
  - best laptops -HP -Chromebook

Method 2

Method 2 of 4:

Excluding Precise Terms

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1
Use -" " to exclude results with a specific phrase or term. In normal Google searches, putting a phrase in quotations is a neat search trick to find results containing specific words. By adding a minus sign, Google will exclude those specific words.
- For example, if you want to search for "best laptops" and want to exclude the term "budget laptops", input the following search:
  - best laptops -"budget laptops"

Method 3

Method 3 of 4:

Excluding Specific Websites

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1
Use site: to exclude results from specific websites. The "site:" tag allows you to ignore any searches from a website. This can be helpful if you want to find less popular results when searching the internet.
- For example, if you want to search for "best laptops" and want to exclude the Amazon website, input the following search:
  - best laptops -site:amazon.com
- You can also use Google to search within specific websites by removing the minus sign.

Method 4

Method 4 of 4:

Troubleshooting

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Use the Advanced Search form. Many Google users report that the using the minus/hyphen symbol to exclude words and phrases doesn't work as reliably as it used to. If you're unable to exclude certain words from your search, go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search. Here, you can enter your search terms, and enter your exclusion(s) into the "none of these words" field for better results.
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Try excluding additional words. If you're trying to exclude a word that's in most or all of the results, Google may ignore the modifier. Google also may show you results containing a variation of the excluded word, such as misspellings or pluralizations. You can i improve your results by excluding even more words or concepts, and adding more keywords to your query.
- For example, if you're searching for the emotion "euphoria" but don't want to see results about the TV show Euphoria, you'll still see results about the show using euphoria -tv. In this case, a search like euphoria emotion -tv or euphoria -tv -series would yield better results.
The - modifier doesn't work on the Google Shopping page. As of now, there's no way to exclude specific words and phrases when searching Google's Shopping tab.