Guide to the Internet - Refining Your Search

This page contains most of the difficult stuff, and can be deferred until you come up against a search that doesn't work. When that happens you will need to know more about boolean logic, search engine arithmetic, truncation and wildcards, phrases and field searching.

As you become more sophisticated in your searching you will finally find a use for all of those search engine help files which you have ignored up till now.

Search technique	Description
Use as many terms as possible search engine guide tutorial	Be specific - use several words, separated by spaces. It is very rare to find no hits because you have typed in too many words. It is all too common to find many thousands of hits because you have not typed in enough. Remember also that nouns are the most powerful words for searching purposes
Use phrases "search engine" guide tutorial	Phrases (words grouped together within apostrophes) are useful if the words need to appear together rather than separately on the page. If you don't quite want a phrase, but you think that the words should appear close together, then AltaVista offers a 'near' facility
Use search engine arithmetic +search +engine +guide+ tutorial +advanced -beginner	(+) before any word means that it must be included (-) before any word means that it must be included
Truncation/wild cards math* for maths, mathematics, mathematical	(*) is a wildcard, meaning a placeholder for zero or more unknown characters. It is useful for: stemming (plurals, different verb endings) you can't remember exact spelling
Parentheses "search engine" and (tutorial or guide)	Using a combination of Boolean logic and parentheses you can construct very complex queries.
Fields title:"search engine" + guide domain:uk +medical +"search engine" host:doh.gov.uk +"clinical governance" url:nyro host:doh.gov.uk +"clinical governance" link:google.com text:"search engine"	Specify where the search words must appear within the web page. You will have to consult the help file for each search engine to use this, as its application varies considerably. title: page title must contain this text domain: specify .uk if you just want websites located in the uK host: page must be located on a specified server e.g. if you want to search the Department of Health server you would use host:doh.gov.uk image: page must contain an image whose file name contains the specified text. url: pages with specified text anywhere within the url, e.g. url:uk will find http://www.doh.gov.uk/dhhome.htm as well as http://www.uk/ link: page must contain a hyperlink for which at least one of the words in the destination address begins with specified text. text: text displayed on the page must contain search words