How to Improve Relevance With Bing
Microsoft's Bing search engine crawls and indexes millions of pages on websites, blogs, forums and social networks. Wading through hundreds of Bing search results to find a specific piece of information takes time and effort, particularly if you're hunting for information in a niche subject area. One way to find information more quickly on Bing is to use advanced search techniques to improve the relevance of search results. Add specific search commands to your Bing searches to filter out irrelevant results.
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Instructions
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Launch your Web browser and go to Bing.com.
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Type relevant keywords or phrases into the search input box. By default, Bing searches for Web pages that contain all or some of your keywords. Bing displays the search results in descending order, with the pages that contain all or most of your keywords listed first.
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Click the magnifying glass icon in the search input field to launch the search. Read the results. If Bing returns irrelevant search results, follow the next steps to refine your search.
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Type your keywords or phrases into the search box. This time place quotation marks around each phrase or word; for example, "The Importance of Being Earnest." Launch the search. Bing returns only results that include the exact words in the correct order.
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Enter your keywords or phrases into the search box and use quotation marks again for precision. This time try excluding certain words to refine your search. Add the "-" symbol or the word "NOT" before keywords and phrases to exclude them from your search. Use the "+" symbol to instruct Bing to include certain words or phrases. An example might look like this:
"The Importance of Being Earnest" + "screenplay" NOT "book"
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Enter your keywords or phrases into the search box. This time try including and excluding certain phrases rather than words to refine your search. Again, use the "+", "-" or "NOT" commands before phrases, but place the phrases in brackets to include or exclude them from your search. For example:
"The Importance of Being Earnest" (+2002 movie) (-1952 movie)
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Launch the search by clicking the magnifying glass icon. Continue to experiment by including and excluding keywords and phrases to filter your search results.
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Tips & Warnings
Use the Narrow by Region tool in the left menu of Bing to restrict search results to certain geographical regions. Use the Narrow by Date options to return results for specified times; for example, for the past week or past month.
