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of an infinite series.
If you type the law and copyright, the inclusion of the word 'the' will return
almost every page we have since almost every one of them uses the word 'the'
and those that don't use the word 'and'. But you probably don't care.
The search will return those pages first that contain the most words
in the search term and so using a lot of terms can still help pull in the
most specific results first. Once you have the results you need, you don't
really have to look at the bogus pages that follow.
You may still want to avoid excessively common words like 'and' and 'the'
as having a lot of them on a page can move that page deceptively early in
the search results.
Use Similar Words - The more similar words you use in a search, the
more relevant your results will be. Example - Search on safe secure privacy
security. The combination of the words with similar meanings produces a stronger
search than any of the terms taken by itself.
Use Appropriate Capitalization - Capitalize proper nouns, and remember
that lower-case words will match any case. For example, typing search will
return all documents containing the words search, Search, and SEARCH. Typing
Search, however, will instruct the search engine to look only for the
capitalized word.
Use Quotation Marks - Use quotation marks to find words which must
appear adjacent to each other, for example, "our pledge to you." Otherwise,
the search results will include the word our, pledge, to, and the word you,
but not necessarily in that order. The words may appear anywhere, and in any
order, within the document.
Use Plus (+) or Minus (-) - Use a plus sign when your search term or
phrase must appear in the search results. Use a minus sign to indicate
undesirable term(s). The plus sign tells the search engine that a certain
word or phrase is required in the search results, and a minus sign indicates
that a word or phrase must be absent in the search results.
Note: A phrase must be contained within quotation marks. Leave no spaces
between the plus or minus sign and the term. Example: +"science fiction"-fantasy
Use Field Searches - Field searches allow you to create specific
searches for words that appear in a specific part of a document. A field
search can be performed on body text (body:), title text (title:), alt text
(alt:), meta description (desc:), meta key words (keys:), URL (url:) or
meta target key words (target:). The field name should be in lower-case and
immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces between the colon
and the search term.
Note: The field searches can only be followed by a word or phrase.
Phrases must be contained within quotation marks.
Example title:"free internet encyclopedia"
Use Wildcards - Wildcard searches can expand the number of matches
for a particular request. The * character is used as the wildcard character.
For instance, searching for wh* will find the words what, why, when, whether, and any other word that starts with wh. Searching for *her* will find the words here, whether, together, gathering, and any other word that contains her anywhere in the word.
Wildcards may be combined with the standard plus (+) and minus (-) modifiers, quotes for phrases, as well as the field search specifiers. Examples: +wh* -se*ch will find all pages which have a word that starts with wh and which does not contain a word that starts with se and ends with ch. "wh* are" will find the phrases where are, what are, why are, etc.