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Tips and Tools for Better Web Searching
Quotation Marks, Parentheses
Try using quotation marks to frame a phrase. This way, the search engine will look for that entire phrase, not just the words sprinkled throughout the document.
“chocolate brownies”
Google will look for the words together first, if you don’t use quotation marks, but the quotation marks will get better results faster.
Some search engines use parentheses instead. Try this if quote marks don’t appear to work.
(chocolate brownies)
Minus Sign
You can rule out pages that might contain specific words by putting a minus sign directly in front of the word you do not want to see:
chocolate fudge recipe –marshmallows
In this example, you would not retrieve recipes that include marshmallow as an ingredient. Note the lack of space between the minus sign and the word you want to eliminate.
Tilde
You can also use the tilde shortcut in Google. Put the tilde in front of your keyword (no space) and Google will search for the word and its common synonyms.
fudgy ~icing
Boolean Searching
Boolean searching means using AND, OR and NOT. To widen your search instead, use OR. Be sure to type it in capital letters.
fudgy (icing OR frosting)
In this example, documents with fudgy icing and fudgy frosting will be retrieved. (Note the use of parentheses.)
Proximity Search
Proximity searching means looking for words that are near one another, not necessarily adjacent. While quote marks force the engine to look for phrases, proximity searching asks the engine to look for words near but not necessarily right next to one another. Use the word NEAR in all capitals:
substitution NEAR chocolate
This retrieves documents about what to use instead of chocolate, looking for both words in the same proximity. You could combine this technique with truncation as well:
substitut* NEAR chocolate
This retrieves even more documents because it looks for substitution, substitute, substitutions, substituting.
Note: This works well in AltaVista, but not in Google.
Asterisk
Asterisks hold the place of letters or words you don’t know in a search.
Truncation means leaving off the end of the word so that the engine searches for all its possibilities. Type in the main part of the word and then an asterisk.
fudg* brownie
will look for fudgy, fudge, fudge-nut and any other recipes that include the fudg part of a word. Google is not good at this; instead, use AltaVista if you want to experiment with truncation.
If you can’t think of a word in a phrase, you can use an asterisk as a “wildcard,” and the search will look for any phrase that includes the other words:
Nestle * cookies
This used as a phrase will turn up Nestle Tollhouse cookies, Nestle Rolo cookies, Nestle Raisinet cookies, etc.
Limiting WHERE Search Engines Look:
By Domain:
Why look at the entire Web when you only want to retrieve articles from scholarly journals, or from business Web sites?
Google, AlltheWeb.com and Teoma allow you to search by domain (that’s the .edu, .org, .net, .com part of the Web address).
chocolate addiction treatment site:edu
looks only at pages posted by university or academic sites. Note there is no space between site, the colon and the domain.
This also works with “link,” a tool that lets you see what sties are linking to the page you are reading. This lets you dig deeply into a topic.
link:www.chocolate.com
This will return all the sites linked to the Chocoholic page.
In AlltheWeb, you don’t even have to use the ”link” syntax but instead just type the URL into the address box. You’ll get a list of all the links to that site.
By File Type:
You may want to find a Word document, Power Point presentation or a PDF file about a certain subject. You can search the Web by file type.
chocolate recipes filetype:doc
Other Tips:
Sometimes, you may want to combine the quotation mark limiters with these other limiters. For instance, fudg* brownie gives you 127 results in Google. If you use this format, “fudg* brownie” (with quotation marks), you get three results. So, if you have thousands of results, you may want to go back and try the search with quotes; if you have only a few results, you may want to make sure you don’t use quotes.
Last, don’t forget that most search engines list a page about search tips, advanced search or other “help” pages. Spending a few minutes on these pages may result in learning even more useful tips and tricks to improve your searching techniques.
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