Despite differences in each search engine's tools, there are tools that many search engines have in common. Keep these three general tips in mind:
The following tools can help narrow your search:
Quotation marks: Sometimes you can add characters to your words or phrases to more closely define your intentions for the search engine. For example, enclosing a multiword phrase in quotation marks tells the search engine to list only sites that contain those words in that exact order.
Plus and minus signs: If you type a plus sign (+) directly in front of a word, you are indicating that the word or phrase must appear in the search results (for example, Hotels +San +Francisco). Similarly, a minus sign (-) indicates that the word or phrase should not be included in the search results (Cars -Ford).
Boolean operators: Boolean operators include AND, OR, AND NOT, and Parentheses. To work, these operators must appear in ALL CAPS and with a space on each side.
AND - Similar to the plus sign, AND indicates that the documents found must contain all the words joined by the AND operator. For example, to find documents that contain the words wizard, oz, and movie, enter wizard AND oz AND movie.
OR - Documents found must contain at least one of the words joined by OR. For example, to find documents that contain the word dog or the word puppy, enter dog OR puppy.
AND NOT - Similar to the minus sign, using AND NOT indicates that the documents found cannot contain the word that follows the term AND NOT. For example, to find documents that contain the word pets but not the word dogs, enter pets AND NOT dogs.
Parentheses - Parentheses are used to group portions of Boolean queries together for more complicated queries. For example, to find documents that contain the word fruit and either the word banana or the word apple, enter fruit AND (banana OR apple).
Title search - This feature enables you to restrict searches to the title portion of web documents. For example, typing title:Mars or t:Mars will retrieve all documents that have the word Mars in their title.
Use lowercase for a case-insensitive match. Otherwise, an exact case match will be used. Example: NeXT.
Use the url: search prefix to search for words within a URL. Example: url:products
If searching for a specific URL type "+url:" before the URL. Example:
+url:http://www.whitehouse.gov
Separate unrelated proper names with a comma. Example: Steve Jobs, Jim Barksdale
If search results are not specific enough, add more terms and select "Search These Results".
Use a pipe (|) to search a certain set of results only. Example: dogs | Dalmatians
Search for a specific site and its related pages. The site: field search examines the "site" part of the URL only. Example: site:sun.com
Use title: to search for a specific title of a site. Example: title:"The New York Times"
Information souce: Patricia James, Multimedia, Mt. San Jacinto College from a presentation at El Camino College on April 24, 1998.