Get your search right first time

You tell a search service what you’re looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in their index relating to those topics. The most relevant content appears at the top of the results.

Here’s an example:
1. Type recipe oatmeal raisin cookies in the search box.
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The Results page will show you numerous pages on the Web about recipes for oatmeal raisin cookies.

Tip: Don’t worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

Use a phrase

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use “double quotation marks“ around the phrase.

Example #1: To find lyrics by Elvis, type “you ain’t nothing but a hound dog” in the search box.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

When in doubt, use lowercase text in your searches
When you use lowercase text, the search service finds both upper and lowercase results. When you use upper case text, the search service first finds the words with upper case.

Example: When you search for paris, you’ll find Paris, paris, and PARIS in your result pages. However, when you search for Paris, you’ll see Paris in the first result pages.

Obviously, this is handy if you need to scale down your number of results for specific names of people or places.

Including or excluding words

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-)sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins, try recipe cookie+oatmeal–raisin.

Expand your search using wildcards (*)
By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: Try wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy.

Fancy features for typical searches

Search engines find more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the Net:

anchor: “whatever”
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the text of a hyperlink. anchor:”Proper tablesettings” would find pages with “Proper tablesettings” as a link.

applet:class
Finds pages that contain a specified Java applet.

domain:domainname
Finds pages within the specified domain. Use domain:de to find pages from Germany, or use domain:org to find pages from organizations.

host:name
Finds pages on a specific computer. The search host:altavista.digital.com would find pages on the AltaVista computer, and host:dilbert.unitedmedia.com would find pages on the computer called dilbert at unitedmedia.com.

image:filename
Finds pages with images having a specific filename. Use image:elvis to find pages with images called elvis.

link:URL
Finds pages with a link to a page with the specified URL text. Use link:didyouknow.org to find all pages linking to didyouknow.org.

text:whatever
Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:cow9 would find all pages with the term cow9 in them.

title:whatever
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:Elvis would find pages with Elvis in the title.

url:whatever
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:tablesettings to find all pages on all servers that have the word tablesettings in the host name, path, or filename–the complete URL, in other words.