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To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more
detailed your query, the more relevant your results.
Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find
exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few
examples:
Note on case sensitivity - only search words or phrases
containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search
on "internet" will match "Internet", "INTERNET",
and "InTerNet", while the search term "INTERNET" would match
only links with INTERNET (in uppercase) in them.
Prefacing a search term with a "special" character can greatly help
you to narrow your searches....
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Symbol
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Translation
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Example
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Usage
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+ / and
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Require this term |
+internet |
Will only display listings that contain the word "internet" |
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-
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Forbid this term |
-web
or ...
+internet -web
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Will only display listings that DO NOT contain the word "web" |
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or
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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") |
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" "
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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. |
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url:
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Find all entries belonging to a given domain or matching a file name |
url:www.mysite.com
url:*asp
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The top example will return all entries in the www.mysite.com
domain. The lower example shows how you could find every .asp page listed in the
engine. |
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mailto
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Find all entries submitted by a person with this email address |
mailto:fred@mysite.com
mailto:fred@mysi*
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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. |
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*
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Match anything |
inter*
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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.
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