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Find Your Needle in the Haystack

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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 Menace? 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 -enterprise

But more focused results could be found by doing this:

"star trek" -voyager -"deep space nine" -"next generation" -enterprise

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