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 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 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
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 menace"
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 their 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: Quixotic Productions- http://www.quixoticproductions.biz Visionary Design.
Quixotic Productions provides web design and hosting services.
You may reprint this article on your web site, provided it is reproduced in
its entirety along with
this resource box. Copyright 2001-2004. All Rights Retained by Author.