Symbol
|
Translation
|
Example
|
Usage
|
+
/ and
|
Require
this term |
+internet |
Will
only display listings that contain the word "internet" |
-
|
Forbid
this term |
-web
or ...
+internet -web |
Will
only display listings that DO NOT contain the word "web" |
or
|
Prefer
this term |
+internet
or web |
This
will find all listings containing "internet", and will rank those that
also contain the word "web" a bit higher. (since web is "preferred") |
"
"
|
Exactly
match this phrase |
"Internet
Help" |
This
will find all listing that contain the phrase "Internet Help". Note that
using the quote marks forces the engine into a case-sensitive search. |
url:
|
Find
all entries belonging to a given domain or matching a file name |
url:www.examplesite.com
url:*asp |
The
top example will return all entries in the www.examplesite.com domain.
The lower example shows how you could find every .asp page listed in the engine. |
mailto
|
Find
all entries submitted by a person with this email address |
mailto:fred@mysite.com
mailto:fred@mysi* |
This
is a convenience search, if you know who posted a link (or want to see if a certain
person has posted any links, this is how you'd find them. |
*
|
Match
anything |
inter*
|
You
can use the asterisk as a "wildcard" to match parts of a word. In our example,
the search would return any listing with any word starting with "inter".
The asterisk does have one limitation: it cannot span words - that is, the query
"mat*arts" would not match the first sentence of this description - and
it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches,
the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three characters,
so a search for "th*" or "an*" would be ignored. |