Query Language

• Phrase search ("")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Site Search to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Site Search already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally.

• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them.
• Fill in the blanks (*)
  The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Site Search to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Bradatech * ] will give you results about many of Bradatech's products (go to next page and next page -- we have many products). Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.
• Search exactly as is (+)
  Site Search employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, software for the query [ soft ware ] (with a space). But sometimes Site Search helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Site Search to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.
• The OR operator
  Site Search's default behaviour is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS).  The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

 

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