WSG Ask Guide

Basic Syntax - Simple Search

Natural language: Ask responds well to natural language queries. It tries to infer intent from words used to deliver answers. Eg what are the best vegetables to eat locates pages that are about nutrition and diet associated with vegetables.

Find these words: Ask looks for all words fruit salad recipes.

Find a phrase (words together): Use quotation marks: "fruit salad" recipes

Require common words: Ask looks more for meaning than the exact word. You don't need to require common words - and, in fact, you can't.

Stop stemming: Ask automatically looks for singular and plural on words and some variants. You can't turn it off.

Must not have word: Use - sign: "fruit salad" -walnuts

OR: Look for alternates fruit OR vegetables

Note: Ask ignores AND, and does not support nesting. On salad fruit OR vegetables. Ask.will look for pages with salad AND fruit, OR anything with vegetables. But mostly it's trying to interpret your query. Don't bother with OR.

1. Spelling
Look for a special spelling Ask can identify common misspellings and accommodate for them; eg geneology is interpreted as genealogy and geneology. On a word such as color, Ask matches only on color, but for colour it finds both.

2. Truncation/ stemming
Get singular and plural. Ask often picks up both.
Get word variants. Check if Ask picked up terms.

3. Quotations
Search for a quotation Enter it as a phrase with quotation marks. Ask has a smaller database and may not do as well as Google or Yahoo..

4. Field Search
Find pages with your topic in the title
Search for intitle:fruit salad Looks for all words in title.
OR use Advanced Search form.

Find sites with word in url
inurl:salads to find sites with the word salads in the URL. Can help to narrow to pages that are about that topic.
OR use Advanced Search form.

Find sites in a certain domain
site:ca salads to find sites in Canada that mention salads.
site:utoronto.ca salads to get pages from all University of Toronto sites.
site:www.utoronto.ca salads to get pages from the www.utoronto.ca host.
Note: Must combine field search with a search term.

OR use Advanced Search form.

To exclude a domain don't use the prefix site. Just enter -gov, -edu, -com etc.

Find sites in a country
Country - chose country from Advanced Search form. Ask then puts option for "pages from" under search box.

Find pages in a particular language.
Limit by Language on the Advanced Search form.

5. Images
Find an image. Click on Images on the top bar to run search immediately. Ask will show related searches. Or, include the words images, pictures in the query.

6. Facts
Enter one or two word phrase, eg hurricanes. Ask has hundreds of Smart Answers that will present facts on a topic.

Date: Advanced Search form
Pages Modifed. Select the time span.

Advanced Search

Search by placement - Anywhere on page, in title, or in url.
Search by date - Time span: week, month, year, 2 years etc..
Search by domain / site - Search by top-level domain (.com. .edu, .ca) or web site domain.
Search by country - Will pick sites according to location rather than domain.

Special Features:
Suggested queries: Search suggestions as you type.
Related Searches: Similar searches on this topic - drawn from search history.

Ask QnA: See questions and answers on a topic. These are from Web answer services and culled from databases. They may include video. They can provide a quick and detailed treatment. Eg swiss chard

Smart Answers: weather, definitions, movies, facts, sports, ready reference types of questions.

Search History: keeps history for a browser session.

MyStuff: Save search history - not working properly - December 31, 2009)

© Gwen Harris
Updated:December 30, 2009