Advanced Search Techniques
There are billions of websites on the Internet. That's just the ones that the major search engines have already indexed. New pages crop up on the web daily and the content on existing pages can change. Learning advanced search techniques not only saves you time, it also helps you find the most relevant results.
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Common Search Operators
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Using search operators can greatly improve the relevance of your results in any search engine. Limit the number of hits for your search by enclosing a phrase in quotes. Searching for "chocolate ice cream" retrieves only pages that contain all these words in that exact order. Without the quotes, your search will return any pages that have one of these words on it.
You can also use operators AND, OR, NEAR, and NOT (caps required) to create better results. Apple AND Pie is similar to "Apple Pie," but the words do not have to be in the exact order that you typed them. Mercedes OR Lexus tires retrieves results for both vehicles, but no results for Buick tires. In the Google search engine, you can limit your results by using NOT or the minus sign. The search hairstyles NOT men's is the same as hairstyles --men's.
Combining common search operators will help you even more. A search for "New York landmarks" AND Manhattan will retrieve Madison Square Garden but not the Bronx Zoo. "New York sightseeing" AND Manhattan -"Times Square" will exclude Times Square from the results.
Site and Domain Searches
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Sometimes you already know where the information you need is located. Perhaps you saw it on the AARP or AAA website. You can avoid seeing results from Priceline and NIH by typing a colon after your search term(s) and operators and the name of the site you wish to search. Type: "living wills" site:AARP.org to find only AARP articles about living wills.
The site: search command also lets you restrict your searches to certain domains. When you want reliable, authoritative information, you might want to get your results from universities and government agencies. To retrieve results from these sites you will need to direct your search engine to look at sites with domain names that end in .edu or .gov. A search for "urban agriculture" site:.edu returns results from educational domains. A search for "tax penalties" site:.gov will return results only from U.S. government agencies.
Advanced Search Options
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You can also use the "Advanced Search" options in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing to make your results more relevant. All of the major engines allow you to enter site and domain restrictions, choose exact phrases, and exclude phrases and words. In Yahoo and Google, you can restrict your results to the past year or even more recent results. You can select or exclude foreign languages and adult websites in all of the major search engines.
Web Crawlers
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Web crawlers are special search engines. They collect results from other search engines for you. The three major search engines use different algorithms for indexing sites. Therefore, their top results are often different. Using a web crawler like Clusty or Dogpile lets you retrieve the top results for your search from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft on one page.
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