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Search Engine Guide -search commands

There are hundreds of search engines on the Internet, maybe even thousands. Some are highly specialised indexing only pages containing specific subjects, while others index all pages on the Internet. Below are a few of the most popular search engines. Most search engines offer specific searches such as news, images, video etc.

google
alltheweb
dogpile
teoma
yahoo

There are some very simple ways to get more exact results from search engines. The first thing to remember is to be specific. Say you want to find a solution to a bug in windows 2000 that crashes your TV card, searching for just "windows 2000" will return lots of useless results. If you instead search for "windows 2000 bugs" you will get more relevant results near the top of your search. If you include what the bug actually is such as "windows 2000 bugs TV card crashes" you will get much more relevant results again. Don't be afraid to be very specific, you will find what your looking for faster. Don't add so many words that you open up your results to masses of useless results, but do use enough specific words to find the information you want.

Using the + symbol

What some people refer to as search engine math, the use of the + and - symbol in your searches gives you very powerful control over your results. You can add and subtract words using these symbols. Most of the search engines support these search controls.

Sometimes you will want to find pages that contain all the words you enter not just some of them. For example, your planning a surfing holiday in Australia, you want to find pages that have references to both surfing and Australia. The + symbol allows you to do this:
+surfing +australia
All the results returned will be pages containing the words surfing and Australia.

You wish to search for pages to help you add users to your windows 2000 computer.
+add +users +windows +2000
This will return very specific results more likely containing instructions about how to add users to windows 2000.

You wish to search for pages about Pamela Anderson that also specifically mention Bay Watch.
+pamela +anderson +bay +watch
This search will return results that mention Pamela, Anderson, Bay, and Watch.

Using the - symbol

The - symbol is used to exclude words that may overwhelm your search, or exclude for other reason.
You wish to search for information on Paris Hilton but don't want to be overwhelmed by pages related to her sex video.
+paris +hilton -sex -video
This tells the search engine to include in the results pages that mention paris and hilton but not pages that mention sex and video.

Your searching for information about Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl but you want only information about his time in the band Nirvana.
+grohl +nirvana -foo -fighters
This would exclude pages with a reference to the band Foo Fighters.

Using quotation marks

Using quotation marks you can multiply terms through a phrase search, this can be a better way to get the results your looking for. The example above +add +users +windows +2000 may obtain even better results by using quotation marks. Note: using "to" in a addition search is useless, many pages covering many subjects would contain this word.
"add users to windows 2000"
Only pages containing all the words in the exact order will be listed. The results should be more on target than with the addition search above.

Combining these symbols

Symbols can also be combined to provide very exact results. The person seeking information about Dave Grohl in Nirvana while excluding his involvement with Foo Fighters may get better results by with;
"dave grohl" +nirvana -"foo fighters"
This would return results that mention the name Dave Grohl (not the millions of other Dave's out there) and Nirvana while excluding Foo Fighters. Well that wasn't such a good example but you get the idea.

With these simple symbols you can perform powerful searches that will return more targeted the results, saving you time looking through pages of unrelated and unintended search results.

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