Found the page but not the reference?
Once you're on a page listed by the site-search engine,
use your browser's "find in page" function (under
"Edit" in Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera) to
locate the word(s) you're searching for.
Not finding a word you're sure should be on the
site?
Try using both singular and plural forms of the word. Try
"cooky" and "cookies";
"mouse" and "mice." Try
different forms as well: "draw" and
"drawing," "math" and
"mathematics," for example. And there's no
need to try them separately. If you were looking for pizza pie,
you could type in "pizza pizzas pie pies" to be
sure you found all references.
Want to find all pages with words that contain certain
letters, such as "pi" (pi, pie, pizza, pineapple, or
epistemological)? Use the dollar sign.
This is a quick way to get the same results as above, but
without all the work. Put a dollar sign in front of the string of
letters you're looking for; you'll get every page that
has a word containing that string. A search on
"$chil," for example, could find words like
"child," "children,"
"children's," and "childhood." Such a
query could also turn up a list of pages containing words like
"Rothschild" and "chilblains" that may have
little to do with your reason for searching, though; so use this
search method with care.
Want "pie" but not "pizza pie"?
Each search word you use may be preceded by the standard
Boolean operators not, and, or or. If you
search for "pie not pizza," you'll find
all documents containing the word "pie"
except those documents that also contain the word
"pizza." (Be careful. The very page you'd
like most to find may say something like "We have a recipe
for every pie except pizza" and would be excluded from your
search.)
Want to find something about making pizza pie crust?
If you type in "and pizza and dough and
recipe," you'll find only those documents
that contain all three search terms. (The default value is
or. Thus, a search for "pizza dough
recipe" would return pages with at least one but
perhaps not all of the three terms.)
Want "pizza pie with pineapple" but not
"pineapple pie"? Use quotation marks.
To find a particular phrase, use quotes. But be sure, then, to
use appropriate capital letters. For example, the query
"new york pizza" (quotes included) would find
only those pages that contain the phrase "new york
pizza" and not those that contain "New York
pizza." In contrast, the query new york pizza,
without quotes, would find every page containing "new,"
"New," "york," "York,"
"pizza," or "Pizza"; and even the query
and new and york and pizza, without quotes, could turn up
something like "Elspeth York has a new recipe for steak and
kidney pizza." You can either zero in on or eliminate
certain phrases from your search by using quotes: a search on
'and pie and pineapple and pizza not "pineapple
pie",' for example, would return only those
documents where the words "pineapple" and
"pie" appear separately.
Want "Siciliano" but not
"siciliano"?
If the word you are seeking is a name and always capitalized,
be sure to capitalize the search term as well.
Hate those extra keystrokes?
Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on
"pie -pizza" is equivalent to "pie not
pizza." Entering "+pizza +dough
+recipe" will return the same documents as "and
pizza and dough and recipe."
These rules are based on Altavista's
query syntax. The original Simple Search was created by Matt
Wright and can be found at Matt's Script
Archive. Like Matt's script, Intermediate Search is
freeware and can easily be set up on most websites.