Search engine help

Boolean search tools

A person using an internet search engine like www.yahoo.com can find things more efficiently by using "Boolean" commands to direct the search. There are different types of Boolean search tools, and they can be combined:

REQUIRED AND PROHIBITED SEARCH WORDS

Add + to a word that needs to be found in all results.
Example: Sarasota Result: Sarasota County, Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, Sarasota Memorial Hospital

Add - in front of a word that you don't want included in your search results.
Example: python -monty Result: Ball Python, Burmese Python, etc.

DOCUMENT SECTION RESTRICTIONS

add u: in front of a word to restrict searches to documents URLs only.
Add t: in front of a word to restrict searches to documents titles only.

PHRASE MATCHING

Put quote marks around a multiword phrase, and the search engine will look at the phrase as if it were a single word, finding only documents in which that exact phrase appears. It might otherwise find any documents in which all of the words appear, no matter what the sequence.

WILDCARD MATCHING

Adding * after a word returns left-side partial matches.
Example: cap* Results: Capital management, Australian Capital Territory, Cape Town

COMBINING BOOLEAN COMMANDS

You can combine any of the commands as long as you use the order in which they are described above +, - , t:, u:, " " and *

Example + t: football - American Results: Football (Australian) , Football (Gaelic), Football (soccer stadium)

NARROWING YOUR SEARCH

Three simple words can increase both the quality and speed of internet searches:
AND , OR , NOT

Here are some Search engines:

www.msn.com
www.yahoo.com
www.google.com
www.aol.com
www.askjeeves.com
www.LookSmart.com
www.InfoSpace.com
www.Overture.com
www.netscape.com
www.altavista.com
www.alltheweb.com
www.lycos.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.hotbot.com
www.easysearcher.com/index.html