Find
Your Needle in the Haystack: Power Searching
By Amy Dent Beebe
Tired
of wading through thousands of results that don't seem to have
anything to do with what you were searching for? Use these tips
to increase your searching productivity! These commands should
work on all the major search engines, a few exceptions are noted.
Use
more than one search engine
No one search engine indexes all websites and pages. So if your
first search doesn't produce the results you want, try searching
with at least one other search engine - the results may often
vary widely due to each search engine's methods of compiling.
Many search engines now offer links other search engines at the
bottom of your search results.
Here
are the current top 10 search engines in order, according to SearchEngineWatch.com:
Yahoo,
MSN, AOL,
Lycos, Google,
Netscape,
NBCi, Excite,
Ask Jeeves,
Alta Vista
Read
the About page
Many search engines have a link that leads to detailed information
about how the search engine compiles and searches through information,
and how to get the best results from it. Reading this page can
save you a lot of time and headaches. Also, visit search engine
home page links with names like How To, Search Help, and Advanced
Search for searching tips.
Don't
be afraid to be specific.
The more information you give a search engine, the easier it will
be to find what you want. If you want information on a recall
pertaining to your car, search for "1995 Mercury Mystique
LS recall." Often, typing in your exact question will actually
produce great results - for instance "Is the ignition in
my 1995 Mercury Mystique LS being recalled?"
Add
it up
When you want to find pages that have all the terms you enter,
rather than any one of them, use the + symbol. This means that
the words with + before them MUST appear in the title or body
of a web page.
For
example, imagine you want to find pages that have references to
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Typing in just Star Wars: The Phantom
Menace will likely get you results with everything from the Regan
Administration to the Phantom of the Opera.
Typing
in:
+star +wars +phantom +menace
would
narrow down your search to pages that specifically refer to only
the Star Wars movie in question, weeding out pages that only refer
to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi.
Here's
another example using recent events:
+china
+crash
Narrow
it down further by adding on:
+china
+crash +spy +plane
Now
if you want to know how this incident may impact trade relations,
find only pages that include that information:
+china
+crash +spy +plane +trade
Take it Away
Sometimes, you want a search engine to find pages that have one
word on them but not another word. Most major search engines allow
you to exclude documents that contain certain words. This is a
helpful way to narrow a search. The - symbol before a word means
that word MUST NOT appear in the title or body of a document.
For
example, imagine you want information about Monty Python, but
don't want to get pages upon pages about python snakes. Try this:
+monty
+python -snakes -reptiles
That
tells the search engine to find pages that mention "month
python" and then to remove any of them that also mention
"snakes" or "reptiles."
The
- symbol is helpful for narrowing results when you get too many
that are unrelated to your topic. Just begin subtracting terms
you know are not of interest, and you (should) get better results.
Find
Your Phrase
Whew! Now that we've got the basics down, it's time to put your
searching into high gear. By combining +, - and phrase searching,
your searching will bring you more and more focused results.
For
example, remember the example above with Star Wars: The Phantom
Menance? To make sure all the terms we in the results, it was
entered like this:
star
+wars +phantom +menace
While
that brings back pages that have all those words on them, it doesn't
require them to be anywhere near each other on the page. You could
get a page that mentions Star Wars in the opening paragraph but
in the middle talks about how Dennis the Menace is their favorite
comic and Phantom of the Opera is their favorite broadway show.
All the words you added together would appear on this page, but
it still might not be what you are looking for.
Avoid
this problem by using a phrase search. This is where you tell
a search engine to give you pages where the terms appear in exactly
the order you specify. You do this by putting quotation marks
around the phrase, like this:
"star
wars: the phantom menace"
The
Combo Platter
Once
you feel comfortable with the tips above, you can begin combining
your knowledge. For example, what if someone was looking for only
Star Trek's original series, and none of the newer series. They
could do this:
star
trek -voyager -deep -space -nine -next -generation
But
more focused results could be found by doing this:
"star
trek" -voyager -"deep space nine" -"next generation"
Searching
the Code
Many
of the major search engines allow you to search within the HTML
of a web page.
The
title in a tag in the HTML that produces the words in the title
bar in the very top of your browser window. For example, this
page has an HTML title like this:
<title>
'Find Your Needle in the Haystack: Power Searching' from Fluid
Communications</title>
This
page might be one of the listings if someone were to search for
the following:
title:
power searching
You
can use your new combo skills with this feature as well:
title:"star
wars" -reagan
title:"star wars" +"phantom meanace"
Unfortunately,
the title: command doesn't work at Lycos or Yahoo. At Lycos, you
need to use the advanced search page to do a title search. At
Yahoo, you must instead use the t: command instead of title: to
search through title.
Another
handy code search is the url: command. Using url: will search
for all urls containing the keyword you specify. This is especially
useful when you can't remember the exact url you are searching
for, and can also be used to help you choose your own domain name.
How many sites already have your keywords in thier name? For example:
url:fluid
This
will find any site that has these five letters in its domain name,
including www.fluidcommunications.org
Note
that Google uses site: rather than url:
Site
Search
With the host: command, you can tell the search engine which websites
should be excluded or included in your search. Let's run through
an example. Imagine you wanted to see all the pages from SubmarineSailor.com.
host:submarinesailor.com
In
response, the search engine would list all of the pages it has
indexed from SubmarineSailor.com
Now
imagine you wanted to find all the pages from SubmarineSailor.com
that also mention the submarine Daniel Boone.
host:submarinesailor.com
Daniel Boone
That
tells the search engine to list pages with the words "Daniel"
and "Boone" that are within the Submarine Sailor site.
You
can pull out your combo skills and get more specific:
host:submarinesailor.com
-"Daniel Boone"
Now
we're telling the search engine to list all pages within Submarine
Sailor that do not contain the exact phrase "Daniel Boone."
In this case, all references to the Daniel Boone submarine would
be excluded, but not any references to someone with the first
name Daniel or the last name Boone.
Get
Wild
You can search for plurals and variations of words using a wildcard.
This is especially useful when you don't know the spelling of
the word. The * symbol is used as the wildcard symbol. For example:
art*
finds arts, artist, artistic, etc.
theat* finds theater and theatre.
Are
You Ready?
Now
that you're armed with a whole new arsenal of searching tools,
get on out there and move around the net faster and more efficiently
than ever before. And if you want to know even more advanced searching
techniques...well, go out and find them yourself!
Brought
to you by: Fluid Communications - http://www.fluidcommunications.org
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Communications provides web design & hosting, graphic design
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may reprint this article on your web site, provided it is reproduced
in it's entirety along with this resource box. Copyright 2001.
All Rights Retained by Author.
