Reference
Search syntax
SearchWebCode matches your query against the raw HTML source of ~95M homepages. Combine exact phrases with AND / OR / NOT logic, filter by TLD, or drop into full regular expressions. Every operator below also works in the search box — or build it visually.
Open the search box →Operators
Whitespace between terms means AND — every term must appear on the page.
| Syntax | Meaning |
|---|---|
| "exact phrase" | Match the string exactly, including spaces and punctuation. Quotes are optional for a single word but required for phrases or anything with a space. |
| a b | AND — a space between terms requires both on the same page. "wp-content" "gtag" = WordPress sites that also load Google Analytics. |
| a OR b · a | b | OR — match pages containing either term. PublicWWW can't do this; we can. "cdn.shopify.com" OR "cdn.bigcommerce.com". |
| -"exclude" | NOT — a leading minus removes pages that contain the term. "wp-content" -"woocommerce" = WordPress without WooCommerce. |
| ( … ) | Grouping to control precedence. Order is NOT > AND > OR, so parenthesize to mix them: ("a" OR "b") -"c". |
| site:tld | Restrict to a top-level domain. site:io, site:gov, site:com. (tld: is an alias.) It filters the top-level domain only — site:example.com is not a thing we can filter on, and says so rather than quietly finding nothing. |
| -site:tld | Exclude a top-level domain. "wp-content" -site:ru = WordPress sites, minus .ru. The minus binds to the filter, not to the next term. |
| /regex/ | A regular expression over the source. /UA-\d{4,}-\d/ finds legacy Analytics IDs. Works standalone or as one term inside a boolean query. Both slashes are required — a bare path like /wp-content/themes is searched literally. |
| \" \\ | Escaping — to search for a literal quote or backslash inside a phrase, escape it: "say \"hi\"". |
Examples
Click any example to run it.
Coming from PublicWWW?
The core operators map 1-to-1 — "phrase", space for AND, - to exclude, and /regex/ all behave the same. Two differences worth knowing:
- We add
OR(and|) for true either/or matching — PublicWWW has no OR operator. - We index one homepage per site (the front page).
ip:,filetype:, and deep-crawl operators aren't part of the standard tier; full-depth crawls are available on Enterprise.
Tips
- Longer, rarer literals are faster and more precise —
"gtag/js?id=G-"beats"gtag". - The result count is an approximate upper bound (a fast trigram estimate); the pages shown are exactly verified against live source.
- Use copy domains / export CSV on the results toolbar to pull the full match list.