Limiting Search Results

When searching for multiple words or phrases, documents returned by a search engine may or may not contain all of your search terms. In order to make sure that a word or phrase included in your search actually appears somewhere in the documents returned to you, simply putting a plus sign (+) in front of a word or phrase will in most cases force the search engine to include that word or phrase in all of the results. This trick often eliminates many irrelevant results, but did you know that you can also tell some search engines WHERE you want the word or phrase to appear? Suppose you are hungry and you get a hankering for a slice of bread. If you are in the library at the time, you know that food is not allowed. So instead of actually eating a piece of bread, you do the next best thing. . . you surf the web for sites that deal with bread. If you use Alta Vista, the search bread brings up over 750,000 sites. You're not that hungry, so you want to lower the number of sites that the search engine finds. One way to do that is to tell the search engine that you only want sites that have the word bread in the title. To do this, type in title:bread. Still using Alta Vista, this search yields a hair over 12,000 sites... many fewer than asking for bread to appear anywhere in the document.

Keep in mind that the title of a document is not the large printed words at the beginning of the page (those are the headers), but are instead the words in small print in the extreme upper left corner of the screen. For this page, the title is "Hope College Libraries: Limiting Search Results." You can limit even further by insisting that the word bread be found somewhere in the URL of the page. This is done by typing url:bread in the search box. Still using Alta Vista, this search gives about 5,700 sites, half as many as the title search found.

Finally, you can really cut down the results by insisting that bread appears in the host portion of the URL (that's the first part of the address, and usually ends with .com, .edu or .org). This time, Alta Vista finds about 250 pages after doing the search host:bread.

The best way to determine if your favorite search engine supports this kind of searching is to read through the help screens of the search engine. You may be surprised at some of the ways you can limit your results. Bon Appetit!

July 20, 2001