Search Results
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QUICK TIPS AND EXAMPLES Searching is easy. Just type in a few words or phrases. Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the better results you'll get. Here are some examples: Search by typing words and phrases. Pentium computer with 8x CD-ROM for saleThe search will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- The search returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms. Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with commas. Pentium computer with "8x CD-ROM", "for sale"A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma. Use UPPER case to indicate exact match. Steve Jobs, NeXTSearch terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will only match NeXT. REFINING A SEARCH It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Here are some effective techniques to try: Identify a phrase. The before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for the home page of songs like "Run, Run, Run" or baseball statistics? Identifying "home run" as a phrase eliminates the ambiguity. This is the most powerful query refinement technique. Add a discriminating word or a phrase. As before, the before query is ambiguous. Adding baseball makes the query less ambiguous. You'll get more total matches (because the query is broadened with an additional term), but the relevance ranking will be better. Capitalize when appropriate. These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible interpretations. For example, without capitalization, wired could refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could refer to the Bells' children on the "Young and the Restless." Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper names. Use a require or reject operator (+,-). Barney alone is ambiguous. Is it looking for Smith Barney investment information or cartoon dinosaur pages? You can use the reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation. Or, you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document. The after version above does both. Use a field specifier. If you are looking for a particular page that you know the site or title, use the site: or title: field specifier to search for the word or phrase in the site or title of the page. See Special Searches for more information on field specifiers. SPECIAL SEARCHES You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using search field syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, and embedded hypertext links. The field name should be in lower case, and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms. The following are examples of special searches: link:www.ms.gov Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with www.ms.gov in its URL. For example, you can use site:sun.com Finds pages on the web site sun.com. The site field search examines the "site" part of the URL only. Therefore, site:sun.com will find such sites as java.sun.com, www.sun.com and playground.sun.com, but won't match any site that ends in sun.co.uk. You can use the site field search to bring up all pages at a particular web site. url:bar Finds pages with the word bar anywhere in the page's URL. For example: http://www.foo.com/bar.htmlYou can also use the url field selection to find out the exact number of pages currently in the database. Just type url:http. This number updated as pages are added and removed from our database. title:"The New York Times" Finds pages with the phrase "The New York Times" in the title portion of the document. REQUIRING OR EXCLUDING TERMS The search has a simple query syntax which gives you the pinpoint search power of Boolean logic, without having to remember complex queries. The table below shows the search operators that correspond to Boolean operators:
Boolean queries use the logical operators AND, OR, NOT and ADJ (adjacent). Suppose you wanted to find plain paper color laser printers made by companies other than HP. This query can be specified in Boolean logic as: (laser ADJ printer) AND (color OR (plain ADJ paper)) AND NOT (HP OR Hewlett-Packard)Using search operators, the complex query above may be typed into the search box as: +"laser printer" color "plain paper" -HP, -Hewlett-PackardThis query specifies that:
SYNTAX SUMMARY
FIELD SEARCH SUMMARY
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