Advanced searches

Search engines have slightly different requirements for carrying out advanced
searches. The general rules are as follows:

+ AND -

• If you put a + in front of a word, documents will be found that contain that word. +traffic+jams will find all documents that contain the word traffic and also the word jams.
• trafficjams would give a list of documents that contain the word jams but will not necessarily be about traffic.
• If you put a - in front of a word, documents will be found that do not contain that word.
• +traffic-jams would give a list of documents that contain the word traffic but miss out those that contain jams.

AND, OR, AND NOT

The word AND can be used to combine key words. All words joined by AND must be contained in the document for it to be listed in the results of a search.

OR can be used to combine key words. At least one of the words joined by OR must be contained in the document for it to be listed in the results of the search. OR is often used to link words that have a similar meaning in a search, for example jam OR marmalade.

AND NOT is also used to combine key words. The search will not include documents containing the word following AND NOT. For example jam AND NOT marmalade would produce documents relating to jam, but not any containing the word marmalade.

Brackets
Brackets are used in searches in the same way as they are used in mathematics.

They can group words together to make a more complex search possible. For example, horses AND (dogs OR cats) would produce a list of documents containing the word horses and either the word dogs, or cats, or both.

Wild card
The character * is called a wild card and can be used to stand for any character or set of characters. For example, typing auto* would produce a list of documents containing words such as automobile, automatic, autogiro, autopsy, and so on.

Titles
Rather than searching whole documents or web sites for key words, a search can be limited to the titles of documents or websites. If the words are important to the document or web site, they may well be contained in the title. The search engine is instructed to do this by typing t: before the key word(s).

For example,
t: “fuel shortage” would search titles containing those words, in that order.