From December 2004 MacWorld
Search Smarter
5 Query Tricks
Searching is simple, right? Just head over to a search
engine, type your search term—for example, Milky Way —and
press return. Within milliseconds, you’re staring at a
list of six trillion pages that contain your query words. Unfortunately,
99.9 percent of those pages probably aren’t about your
favorite galaxy. You need to filter out the flotsam. These
simple yet sophisticated tricks work with nearly all search
engines.
1. Include Quotation Marks If your search
term is actually a phrase, put it in quotes, like this: “Milky Way” .
Doing so eliminates any pages that contain just milky or only
way. This trick is also good for names ( “Dan Rather” )
and lyrics ( “Mary had a little lamb” ), and for
ensuring that your search engine doesn’t ignore common
and small words such as a, and, and the. Many search sites consider
these words superfluous unless you specify that they’re
part of a phrase. So typing “to be or not to be” can
get you vastly different results than to be or not to be .
2. Be Negative When you put a minus sign
in front of a word in your query, search engines ignore pages
that contain
that word—which
is a fantastic way to weed out irrelevant pages and focus your
results. For example, in your search for “Milky Way” ,
eliminate words such as chocolate and candy —so the whole
query looks like “Milky Way” -chocolate -candy .
The results of that search won’t include any pages
mentioning either chocolate or candy. (Incidentally, this
example shows
you something else important: you can mix and match query tricks.)
3. Use Wildcards A wildcard is a symbol—usually an asterisk
(*) but sometimes a question mark (?)—that stands in for
words or partial words you don’t know. For instance, if
you can’t remember just what it was Mary had, enter “Mary
had a little *” . Your search results are likely
to start with instances of Mary had a little lamb, but
they
could also
include variations, such as Mary had a little headache.
Some search engines—unfortunately, not Google—let
you use a wildcard to substitute for part of a word, such as “G*
Bush” —which gives you results including George Bush.
The partial-word wildcard is critical when you can’t remember
how to spell something. Another search engine I haven’t
mentioned— AltaVista —lets you use that trick.
4. Ask an Answer When you have a question—“What color
is Brad Pitt’s hair?”—what you really want
to find is the answer. Therefore, your best bet is to search
for the answer: “Brad Pitt’s hair is *” . (If
you search for a question, you’ll find pages asking the
same thing.) The wildcard and quotation marks come in handy in
these queries, though you may have to try a few variations, for
example, “Brad Pitt has * hair” -facial .
5. Try an Advanced Search Almost all search
engines have a form for running an advanced search (look
for a link on
the
home page).
This form lets you specify additional conditions to narrow
your search. Different engines offer different options,
but common
choices include date ranges (good for filtering out current
or stale news); domains (a nice way to narrow your search
if you’re
looking for, say, pages from nonprofit companies); and
languages (if you want only sites in Farsi, this is the
way to get
them).
Advanced search pages often let you block adult content
from your results. However, this “safe searching” can
occasionally block legit pages.