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The Shortest Path to a Site's Heart

Found the page but not the reference?

Once you're on a page listed by the site-search engine, use your browser's "find in page" function (under "Edit" in Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera) to locate the word(s) you're searching for.

Not finding a word you're sure should be on the site?

If it's a proper name, try capitalizing the first letter. For other terms, try using both singular and plural forms of the word. Try story and stories; trailer and trailers; index, indexes, and indices. Try different forms as well: fence and fencing, house and housing, sign and signage, or residence and residential, for example. And there's no need to try them separately. If you were looking, say, for pizza pie — silly example, but bear with us — you could type in pizza pizzas pie pies to be sure you found all references.

Want to find all pages with words that contain the letters pi (pi, pie, pizza, pineapple, or epistemological)? Use the dollar sign.

This is a quick way to get the same results as above, but without all the work. Put a dollar sign in front of the string of letters you're looking for; you'll get every page that has a word containing that string. A search on $child, for example, could find words like child, children, children's, and childhood. A search on $residen, could find resident, residents, resident's, residents', residence, residences, and residential. Such queries, though, could also turn up a list of pages containing words like Rothschild and president that may have little to do with your reason for searching; so use this search method with care.

Want pie but not pizza pie?

Each search word you use may be preceded by the standard Boolean operators not, and, or or. If you search for pie not pizza, you'll find all documents containing the word pie except those documents that also contain the word pizza. (Be careful. The very page you really want may say something like “We have a recipe for every pie except pizza” so would be excluded from your search.)

Want to find something about making pizza pie crust?

If you type in and pizza and dough and recipe, you'll find only those documents that contain all three search terms. (The default value is or. Thus, a search for pizza dough recipe would return pages with at least one but perhaps not all of the three terms.)

Want pizza pie with pineapple but not pineapple pie? Use quotation marks.

To find a particular phrase, use quotes. But be sure, then, to use appropriate capital letters. For example, the query “new york pizza” (quotes included) would find only those pages that contain the phrase “new york pizza” and not those that contain “New York pizza.” In contrast, the query new york pizza, without quotes, would find every page containing “new,” “New,” “york,” “York,” “pizza,” or “Pizza”; and even the query and new and york and pizza, without quotes, could turn up something like “Elspeth York has a new recipe for steak and kidney pizza.” You can either zero in on or eliminate certain phrases from your search by using quotes: a search on and pie and pineapple and pizza not “pineapple pie”, for example, would return only those documents where the words pineapple and pie appear separately.

Want Siciliano but not siciliano?

If the word you are seeking is a name and always capitalized, be sure to capitalize the search term as well.

Hate those extra keystrokes?

Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on pie -pizza is equivalent to pie not pizza. Entering +pizza +dough +recipe will return the same documents as and pizza and dough and recipe.

These rules are based on Altavista's query syntax. The original Simple Search was created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt's Script Archive. Like Matt's script, Intermediate Search is freeware and can easily be set up on most websites.