The search engines vary in power and in the way in which they work. It's worth taking the time to practise finding information on Net. Try and narrow down your search by using more than one keyword for the search. This will avoid too much 'dross' appearing. Which is the best search engine? That's a matter of opinion and it can depend on what type of search you want. We use most of them, but we generally find we get the best results with Google.
|
Symbol |
Translation |
Example |
Usage |
|
+ / and |
Must have this term | +bear | Will only display listings that contain the word "bear" |
|
- |
Must not include this term | -elephant
or ... +bear -elephant |
Will only display listings that do not contain the word "elephant" |
|
or |
Prefer this term | +bear or elephant | This will find all listings containing "bear", and will rank those that also contain the word "elephant" a bit higher. (since elephant is "preferred") |
|
" " |
Exactly match this phrase | "elephant trunk" | This will find all listing that contain the phrase "elephant trunk". Note that using the quote marks forces the engine into a case-sensitive search. |
|
url: |
Find all entries belonging to a given domain or matching a file name | url:www.portalseek.com
url:*asp |
The top example will return all entries in the www.portalseek.com domain. The lower example shows how you could find every .asp page listed in the engine. |
|
mailto: |
Find all entries submitted by a person with this email address |
mailto:fred@mysite.com mailto:fred@mysi* |
This is a convenience search, if you know who posted a link (or want to see if a certain person has posted any links, this is how you'd find them. |
|
* |
Match anything |
inter*
|
You can use the asterisk as a "wildcard" to match parts of a word. In our example, the search would return any listing with any word starting with "inter". The asterisk does have one limitation: it cannot span words - that is, the query "mat*arts" would not match the first sentence of this description - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three characters, so a search for "th*" or "an*" would be ignored. |