Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.
More Basics - An Overview
Here's a quick overview of the rest of our Basic Help. Just click on the links to jump to these sections.
What is an 'Index'?
What is a word?
What is a phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Fancy Features for Typical Searches
What is an Index? - Webster's dictionary describes
an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our
index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages and discussion
group pages from around the world. The 'index' becomes larger every
day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have
technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When
you use our search service, you search the entire collection using
keywords or phrases.
What is a word? - When searching, think of
a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service
needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what
you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space
and tabs.
What is a phrase? You can link words and numbers
together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear
together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase,
use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you
enter words in the search box.
Example #1: To find lyrics by the King, type "you ain't nothing
but a hound dog" in the search box. You can also create phrases
using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore
lines, commas, slashes, or dots.
Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999
9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches - All
searches are case insensitive and accent insensitive. Searching for
"Fur" will match the lowercase "fur", uppercase
"FUR", and German "für".
Including or excluding words:
To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search
topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search
box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your
search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search
box.
Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins,
try recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin.
Expand your search using wildcards (*):
By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the
word with multiple endings.
Example: Try wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and
wishy-washy.
Fancy Features for Typical Searches - You
can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you
can search on the net: |