SEARCH SALON_.|_.H E L P + Quick Tips and Examples + Refining a Search + Special Searches + Requiring or Excluding Terms + Search Syntax Summary - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Quick Tips and Examples Try to use discriminating words or phrases that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the better results you'll get. Here are some examples:
Search by typing words and phrases. Pentium computer with 8x CD-ROM for saleYou will get documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- relevant results are returned even if they don't contain all query terms.
Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with
commas. Pentium computer with "8x CD-ROM", "for sale"A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.
Use UPPER case to indicate exact match. Steve Jobs, NeXTAdjacent capitalized words are automatically treated as a single phrase. Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will only match NeXT.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Refining a Search It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Here are some effective techniques to try:
Identify a phrase. The before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for the home page of songs like "Run, Run, Run" or baseball statistics? Identifying "home run" as a phrase eliminates the ambiguity. This is the most powerful query refinement technique.
Add a discriminating word or a phrase. As before, the before query is ambiguous. Adding baseball makes the query less ambiguous. You'll get more total matches (because the query is broadened with an additional term), but the relevance ranking will be better.
Capitalize when appropriate. These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible interpretations. For example, without capitalization, wired could refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could refer to the Bells' children on the "Young and the Restless." Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. Be sure to place a comma between unrelated capitalized words, since Infoseek treats adjacent capitalized words as if they formed a single phrase. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-). Barney alone is ambiguous. It it looking for Smith Barney investment information or cartoon dinosaur pages? You can use the reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation. Or, you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document. The after version above does both.
Use a field specifier. If you are looking for a particular page that you know the site or title, use the site: or title: field specifier to search for that the word or phrase in the site or title of the page. See Special Searches for more information on field specifiers.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Special Searches You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using our field syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, and any additional information defined with an HTML meta tag. The field name should be in lower case, and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.
Examples
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Requiring or Excluding Terms We have a simple query syntax which gives you the pinpoint search power of Boolean logic, without having to remember complex queries. The table below shows the search operators that correspond to Boolean operators:
Boolean queries use the logical operators AND, OR, NOT and ADJ (adjacent). Suppose you wanted to find plain paper color laser printers made by companies other than HP. This query can be specified in Boolean logic as: (laser ADJ printer) AND (color OR (plain ADJ paper)) AND NOT (HP OR Hewlett-Packard)Using Infoseek operators, the complex query above may be typed into the search box as: +"laser printer" color "plain paper" -HP, -Hewlett-PackardThis query specifies that:
A traditional Boolean search returns an unsorted list of all items that match the search condition. We use advanced statistical search technology to return the results sorted with the "best" matches listed at the top. Unlike plain Boolean searches, we automatically weight your query terms based on their statistical uniqueness. Common terms, such as "shall," get a much lower weighting than less frequently occurring terms, such as the phrase "golf courses." our advanced statistical weighting allows you to just type in relevant words and phrases, and the system will provide the answer to your query in the top few documents! Since there are cases in which it is convenient to narrow a query using Boolean operators, our search engine allows you to use the + and - Boolean operators. You get the accurate ranking of statistical searching combined with the information filtering of Boolean searching.
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Field Search Summary
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