| 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.mysite.com
url:*asp
|
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. |
| 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. |
|