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How to Search
the Internet 101
When developing your new website it would be
helpful to know all the tricks of how people search the internet
using their favorite search engine such as Ask.com, Excite.com,
Google.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com and thousands of others. So here
is a Crash Course in Searching with
YourFavoriteSearchEngine.
Input terms to specify that result
pages contain all of these terms.
Example: los angeles shops
Use quotations to specify a phrase. YourFavoriteSearchEngine
returns results which exactly match the given phrase.
Example: "John F Kennedy"
You can also use a "-" sign
before a term to specify that a result page must not contain the
term.
Example: apple -computer will return pages that must contain the
word "apple" and do not contain the word "computer."
Be specific:
Example: If you are looking for the a map for Paris France, type
in map paris france not maps France
Example: If you are looking for a specific car model, type in
volvo cars rather than cars
Different word stems or endings can
lead to different results. Try all endings.
Example: dog will get different results than dogs
Example: running a marathon will get different results than run
a marathon
Check your spelling.
YourFavoriteSearchEngine looks for exactly what you type in.
YourFavoriteSearchEngine searches are NOT case sensitive. All
letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as
lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George
Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same
results.
Advanced Search Syntax
YourFavoriteSearchEngine supports full Boolean expressions for
advanced search queries. For example, if you were to search for
dog cat, YourFavoriteSearchEngine would return pages containing
both the words dog and cat. On the other hand, writing dog or
cat would yield pages containing either or both of the words.
The word or is thus interpreted by YourFavoriteSearchEngine to
mean "either or both of the words". The word and (as in dog and
cat) on the other hand tells YourFavoriteSearchEngine to look
for documents matching both words. Since this is the default
behavior, and may be left out.
The and and or operators may be
combined with phrase searching and the - operator.
You may also want to use parentheses to alter the order of
interpretation. The following examples explain these concepts.
Example: travel and (france or italy) will return pages
containing the word "travel" and either or both of the words "france"
and "italy". Note that you may omit and in this query. This
query would typically yield pages with information on travelling
to France or Italy or both.
Example: travel and france or italy will yield different results
from the previous example, namely documents that contains the
words "travel" and "france" OR the word "italy" OR all three of
the words. This means you would find pages about travelling to
France and pages about Italy in general, and pages that are both
about Italy in general and about travelling to France.
Example: (cars -volvo) or (motorcycles -"harley davidson") would
render car information that makes no reference to volvo and
motorcycle information making no reference to the phrase "harley
davidson".
By including the host: operator you may
constrain your search to just one host machine.
Example: contact host:www.YourFavoriteSearchEngine.com looks for
contact information on the host
www.YourFavoriteSearchEngine.com.
From the Advanced Search page, you have access to several other
useful search functions, such as searching only pages from a
particular region or in a particular language.
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