Earlier this month, The Guardian published a tips-and-tricks article on Google search. Much to my surprise, I picked up three new techniques for making my searches less precise, which can actually bring them more in line with what I'm looking for.

And then I immediately dropped one of those three. It turns out nobody else knew about it, either, so Google killed support for the tilde search operator back in 2013.

First, here are two handy search operators that are still supported, according to this Google help page.

To include a range of numbers in your search terms, you can use the .. range operator. For example, if you're looking for something related to a World's Fair some time in the 1930s, you can use the following search:

world's fair 1930..1939

If you can't remember a word within a phrase, type an asterisk in that spot instead.

For example, if you search for * of the universe, you'll get results for the scale of the universe, "Masters of the Universe", age of the universe, Church of the Universe, etc.

It used to be that you could use the tilde operator to pull in related terms. For example, if you wanted to search for "university" but pull in results for "college" as well, you could add a tilde at the start of the word "university", like this:

liberal arts ~university

However, Google dropped support for the tilde operator back in 2013. I tagged the author of The Guardian's article in a tweet to let him know. We'll see if the article is corrected.

Update: Samuel Gibbs, author of the article in The Guardian, sees different results when he uses the tilde operator, where here in the States we don't. Perhaps it's a difference with google.co.uk.