Online Repair Manuals: Google Tips

In this post, we’ll be offering you more tips on how you can easily search for good online auto repair manuals. One good way to facilitate searches is to make sure that the search terms are well-defined and strategic enough to get relevant pages. All it takes is a little crafty search engine know-how in order to get the results you want. Google is your friend, and here are some ways to refine your searches.

Use quotation marks

Enclosing your search term with quotation marks will net results that are exact matches to what you searched for. This will allow you to filter through pages that contain your keywords, except they occur separately, so it’s not really what you want.

Limit your search terms

You need to know exactly what you want to look for. If you’re looking for a generic repair manual, indicate it in your search. If you want a diagram for a particular component or system, make sure you type that in your search query. Don’t be too conservative with your search. Don’t say “Porsche Repair Manual” if you really wanted to look for a “Porsche 911 Service and Maintenance Schedule.”

Use the “Search within results” function

Once you’ve already gotten an initial page of results, you can still search through those results! Neat, huh? This is a good way to look for particular content using only the results you already have, instead of searching through the whole World Wide Web.

The * Wildcard Can be Really Helpful

Not many use the * character in their Google searches, but it can be quite useful. The * will stand for any term, so if you are unsure about what should be part of your search keywords, you can use this to help look for viable results. For example, if you don’t remember the full name of a certain part, you can let the * do the trick.


These are just a few tips when working with Google searches to look for free online repair manuals. As we’ve discussed previously, there are still many other avenues through which you can find reliable online car repair manuals, and we’ll save the tips and tricks for those for a later post.