How to Perform a Bing Advanced Search
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Popular search engines like Bing can connect you to an endless world of insight and knowledge. However, without knowing the many different ways to use Bing advanced search functionality, you won’t use it to its full potential.
Running an advanced search instead of a basic one limits the results you get back, prioritizes the most important ones at the top, and ultimately makes it easier and faster to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Note that in this article, we’ll be using the term “keyword” to indicate both a singular keyword and a longer keyword phrase.
4 Bing Advanced Search Options
From using Bing’s built-in advanced search filters to trying out different Bing search commands for more relevant results, there are a lot of ways to find what you’re looking for.
Bing Advanced Search for Latest News
With a couple of helpful news filters, you can find the most recent news on a particular top. Enter your keyword in the Bing search bar and press Enter, then click the News tab.
Below that are two dropdown menus. The Any time menu lets you sort by the past hour, 24 hours, seven days or 30 days. The second menu lets you select either Best match or Most recent.
Bing Reverse Image Search
If you have an image and you want to find other places that image lives online or similar images, you can run a reverse image search. Instead of searching for a keyword and having Bing show you pages where that keyword is included, you’ll upload an image, and Bing will show you the pages where that and similar images are found.
On the right side of the Bing search bar, click the Camera icon.
This box will pop up, which lets you add an image with drag-and-drop, uploading or pasting the URL.
After adding your image, you’ll see results for where that image and/or similar ones are found online.
Bing Advanced Search for Video Content
There are a lot of filtering options when looking for videos with Bing. After entering your keyword, click the Videos option under the search bar, then Filter on the far right. You can then modify the results by video length, date, resolution, source and price.
Bing Search Operators
By using Bing search parameters, you can filter, modify and refine your searches. Note that Bing automatically ignores punctuation and stop words (a, and, or…). If they’re an important part of your search, place quotation marks around them or precede them with a plus sign.
The Most Useful Bing Advanced Search Operators
Search operators are codes that you use along with keywords or phrases to refine results. Below are the most common commands to try for a Bing advanced search. If you’re looking for other Bing search operators, you can find them here.
AND
Using the word “AND” or an ampersand (&) returns results with all of the specified keywords. This is technically a Boolean search operator instead of strictly one of the Bing search commands.
When using Boolean search operators, make sure to capitalize them: AND, NOT, OR. Otherwise, Bing won’t consider them search parameters and will instead treat them like regular words.
Here are the recipes for this search operator:
- ”keyword” AND “keyword”
- ”keyword” & “keyword”
By default, Bing uses the “and” Boolean operator in search, so you don’t need to use it if you’re not using any other Bing search parameters. But it can be useful when combined with additional Bing search operators.
Minus Sign or NOT
Use the minus sign (-) or the word “NOT” (another Boolean operator) along with two keywords to exclude certain results. You’ll search for the first word while excluding results with the second word.
Here are the recipes for this search operator:
- keyword -keyword
- keyword NOT keyword
If I want to search for Disney content but don’t want Disney World content, I could try Disney -world.
As you can see, this Bing search syntax doesn’t work so well. I tried this with several keyword combinations and had similar results each time.
However, even though Disney World information is at the top of my search that tried to exclude the word “world,” as you scroll down, you come to some non-Disney World info.
This is different from searching for Disney+world, which gives you all Disney World-focused results. So, you’ll weed some info out, though it’s not completely accurate.
OR
The word “OR” or the line symbol ( | ) are also Boolean operators. They help you find results with either one of the specified search terms.
Here are the recipes for this search operator:
- keyword OR keyword
- keyword | keyword
If I want to research wearable devices and Fitbit devices, but I don’t need each article to include information about both, I can search for wearables OR Fitbit. Below these results are a number of roundup articles about different wearable devices.
Parentheses
Use parentheses (( )) to find either/or results. For example, if I want to find marketing articles about either Instagram or Facebook, I would search for marketing (Instagram OR Facebook).
Here’s the recipe for this search operator: keyword (keyword OR keyword)
Plus Sign
Use the plus sign (+) along with two keywords to find content related to both topics. There are two ways to use the plus sign for Bing search syntax: with a space and without a space.
Plus Sign With a Space
Here’s the recipe for this search operator: keyword +keyword
If I want to look for information about smart lighting, but I don’t need the full phrase “smart lighting” to be included in the content, I could search for smart +lighting.
Plus Sign Without a Space
Here’s the recipe for this search operator: keyword+keyword
If I want to look for content that includes the exact phrase “smart lighting,” I would search for smart+lighting.
Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks (“”) to find exact-match search results. Here’s the recipe for this search operator: ”keyword phrase”
Searching for “visit Sedona in winter” gives me these results:
Wrapping Up
There are all sorts of ways to run a Bing advanced search, from using the easy-to-find built-in tools to knowing how to work with Bing search commands. And if you also want to know how to get better at searching on Google, check out our guide to Google search operators.