WSG BING SEARCH Guide

Basic Syntax - Simple Search
Find these words: Bing looks for all words except very common ones -- fruit salad recipes. NOTE - only accepts first 10 terms.

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

Require common words: Use + sign +the best "fruit salad"

Stop Stemming: Bing automatically looks for singular, plural, and other forms of a word. Use + to stop Bing from searching on these "related terms".

Exclude word: Use - sign: "fuit salad" -walnuts

AND -- fruit AND vegetables AND sesame (AND is assumed)
OR: Look for alternates - nest terms -- salad AND (fruit OR vegetables)
NOT: Exclude -- (rutabaga OR turnip) NOT greens

1. Spelling
Bing corrects spelling and looks for your words and the correct words.
For a word like color, Bing matches on color, but for colour will search for both. To get only colour use +colour

2. Truncation/ stemming
Bing will automatically search on "related" terms - typically singular and plural forms. Turn this off with + .
Get singular and plural. Bing might do this for you. Otherwise enter both with OR. Should nest terms (A OR B)
Get word variants. Can enter several with OR. Should nest terms (A OR B) .

3. Quotations
Search for a quotation Enter it as a phrase with quotation marks around..

4. Show matches (Cache)
Cached View the page as it was when indexed. Shows date.

5. Field Search
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.

Find sites in a geographic area
loc:au or location:au to find sites in Australia regardless of top-level domain. Use Help to get codes.

Find pages in a particular language.
language:fr fruit salade to find sites in French. Others -- english (EN), danish (DA), dutch (NL), french (FR), german (DE), italian (IT), norwegian (NO), portuguese (PT), spanish (ES), swedish (SV). Must combine with a search term.Use Help to get codes.

Find pages with some of words in title
intitle:"fruit salad" gourmet - looks for fruit salad in title and gourmet anywhere.

Find pages with either A or B in title
intitle:"fruit salad" OR intitle:"fruit compote"

Find pages with some of words in url - [Discontinued late 2007]

Find pages with word in body text
universities inbody:"wilfred laurier" -- Limited use.

Find pages at a site
site:utoronto.ca - Site can be the host url or just the domain. Can also use domain:

Find pages at a site with a term
site:plc.fis.utoronto.ca genealogy

Find pdf documents on a topic
filetype:pdf "fruit salad". Live also has ppt, xls, doc, pdf, rdf. Can combine with other commands.

Find flash files
play hockey game contains:swf. Flash files are often mini-videos that can be interactive. Good for finding online games and tutorials

6. Backward Search [Completely removed 2008]

7. Images
Find an image
Select the Images Tab. Refine by several parameters. Can find similar images (mouseover the image).
Use trigger words in web search query: image, images, picture, pictures.

8.Videos
Find a video
Select the Video Tab. Refine by several parameters including source. Mouse over to play video thumbnail in the browser. . Can find similar images (mouseover the image).
Use video as trigger word in web search query query: eg video julia child

Special Features:

Suggested queries: Search suggestions as you type.
Related Searches - Bing identifies searches that seem related to yours. Has some capabilities for semantic interpretation. Eg on caribou migration will see elk migration.
Categories and Web Groups - Related searches are generalized into broader categories such as Reference, News, and web results are organized into these groups on the page
Search History - History is saved during a browser session. Can also save and share for a longer term. .

© Gwen Harris
Updated:December 30, 2009