Syntax Answer Page

Natural Language

Google: Use natural phrasing - keep words in their natural order - add context words to distinguish between meanings; such as between apple the computer or apple the fruit.

1. first woman to climb Mount Everest -- Results page (shortcut) will likely put The Mount Everest History / Facts page at the top. It identifies the first woman (Junko Tabei from Japan in 1975) and the first American woman (Stacy Allison in 1987). Sharon Wood, a Canadian, also claims to have been the first American woman. Her climb was in 1986.
   
   
2. budget accommodation in Paris France-- Results: Google finds hundreds of possibilities starting with a map of hotels. The Sponsored Links might be useful too. This query even works if you misspell accommodation. Try this question with any destination.

3. convert gallons to cubic meters -- Results: There are several hits on the first page that can be used to convert volumes. Google also has an instant answer from its calculator. More about Google calculations.

Other Search Engines: All search engines will accept natural language phrasing. Many will also do calculations and conversions: Ask, Bing, and Yahoo.

Hakia thrives on words. It does quite well on the factual questions. Often the answer is in the highlighted text. You'll see the variety of material indexed by Hakia. The fuzzier searches show how Hakia looks for meaning rather than exact words.

1. introducing collaboration to the workplace -- Results: Web results have good matches on phrasing. There will likely be results from images and news.
2. diagnosing concussion -- Results: (shortcut) Hakia points to its Gallery of topics with information that has been assembled as a package: basic information, symptoms and diagnostics etc.

Ask seeks answers. It doesn't hestitate to answer any of these.

1. first woman to climb Mount Everest - Results: first hit is the answer
2. who was tecumseh - Results: Ask has a smart answer capsule
3. what are the qualities of an online course -- Results: Ask returns very relevant results.

Special Note about results.

Phrase Searching

Google: Use quotation marks to indicate you want the words to be found together.

1. "Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World"
   
   You could go for broke and look for the full title. This will find online stores advertising the book, Google Books, several reviews, and possibly Tapscott's site.

2. "Grown Up Digital" How the "Net Generation" is Changing Your World
   
   If the full quote fails or brings in too few results, relax the search by picking out the key phrases. You'll get more results and may see some variations.

3. "Grown Up Digital" How the "Net Generation" is Changing Your World excerpt
   Add the term 'excerpt' to specify exactly what you would like to see.

4. On the Book Search you'll get an overview and be able to read a few pages. You can also search inside the book and be linked to passages.
   

5. "what we play is life"
   
   Louis Armstrong is widely quoted. Use the quotation marks to mark the quotation.
   
   Use the Google Book Search to find books where this phrase occurs in a book. GBS will sometimes show snippets of the passages where this phrase appears. Click on the hyperlinked page to be taken "inside the book".

Other Search Engines: All search engines use quotation marks to delineate phrases. Only Google uses * to force proximity.

Special Note about results.

Boolean

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Exalead: All of these will produce a lot of hits for this search - history "north america" (inuit OR eskimo). We would want to add more words to describe what we're really interested in - history of hunting? cultural history? contact with the European? We can also consider excluding some sites. Perhaps we would like to exclude galleries from the search, or even museums. Do that with the minus sign.

Google: It's a good practice to put the terms connected by the OR inside brackets so that Google understands that you want "writing course" or "writing class" along with online.

You can try another term - virtual - to get different results, and even more by using the tilde (~virtual) to pick up related words. What other terms did Google pick up for virtual? There are at least 2.

• online ("writing course" OR "writing class")
• ~virtual ("writing course" OR "writing class")

On phrases where one word is repeated, you can construct the query with an OR -- "writing (course OR class)" is the same as "writing course" OR "writing class"

Special Note about results.

Proximity

Exalead: You will probably need to play with words, possibly substituting other business words such as share, percent, growth, demand. However, we can start with organic chocolate market sales and start to narrow using NEAR. It's helpful to try organic NEAR/5 chocolate market sales - in other words keep the relation between organic and chocolate loose for a while to see what comes up.

Google: Work with natural phrasing where you would expect more words to follow, or to precede. Try different combinations.

• market sales of organic chocolate *
• rising demand for organic chocolate *
• * organic chocolate sales

Stemming

Google:

~invest "socially responsible"

Using the ~ will improve relevance of the search results and often the number. ~invest will pick up investing, investors, investment, as well as the word funds - and will rank pages that have those words higher.. The ~ is often good for finding variants but is not guaranteed. Google calls this a synonym operator - it is NOT a stemming operator.

Exalead:

invest* "socially responsible"

Using * will find investing, investors, investments.

Other Search Engines: Bing, Yahoo, and Ask will usually pick up singular and plural but they don't offer an operator you can use to trigger this.

Special Note about results.

Fielded Search

Google: Once you get the hang of the field names, entering them will be easier than using the form.

intitle:gallipoli australian battles site:au

Gallipoli is the most important word - look for it in the title. Add qualifiers such as battles and australian. Could also use ~australian.

Using the Advanced Search form: - Will be restricted to looking for words only in title or anywhere. Cut back on the terms.

Find web pages that have all these word gallipoli battles
Search within a site or domain au
Click on +Date, Usage Rights, Numerics - to get more choices
Where your keywords show up: in the title of the page

Yahoo

intitle:"land mines" ban anti-personnel

This simple search asks to see "land mines" in the title along with ban and anti-personnel anywhere on the page. Yahoo shows an abbreviated title of about 10 words on its search results page. If a result doesn't show your term, it is because it falls outside Yahoo's 10-word display.

intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines ban anti-personnel

This construction handles the alternate spellings in the title AND requires the presence of the other terms. Yahoo is sensitive to the use of the parenthesis - this search statement will not work properly with brackets, as in (intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines).

Exalead Search: Exalead, on the other hand, handles the boolean construction perfectly.

(intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines) ban anti-personnel

You can also nest the search terms for the title.

intitle:("land mines" OR landmines) ban anti-personnel

Bing: Bing will also handle the OR search on words intitle quite nicely.

(intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines) ban anti-personnel

Ask.com: Use the Advanced Search form to restrict on date. Ask has good options for limiting a search by date. However, although you'll find that the results are on topic, there may be many news stories from much earlier! Ask like all the others captures the date the page was last indexed rather than actually updated. Ask doesn't show dates on the results page.

Find results with All of the words: ban anti-personnel land mines
Page Modified: last three months

Google: The quickest way to search a domain (or site) is to use the site prefix to identify the domain for Health Canada and add search terms to the query.

site:hc-sc.gc.ca diabetes

You can also use the Advanced Search form to restrict the domain to hc-sc.gc.ca and diabetes as the search term.

Special Note about results

Filetype

Google: We can narrow the search quickly by looking for words in title, limiting to the Government of Ontario domain, and selecting only pdf documents.

Using the Advanced Search form:

All of these words: environment
File type: pdf
Site or Domain: gov.on.ca
Where your keywords show up (expand Date, usage rights ... to see): in the title of the page

From the search box you can also enter:

filetype:pdf intitle:environment site:gov.on.ca

If results seem cluttered with powerpoint presentations, you can exclude them. For example:

intitle:"web searching" -filetype:ppt

Special Note about results

Related Search

Ask shows a partial breakdown about organic food- but it's mainly repeating the key phrase with some other words.

Clusty is does a very good with folders for farming and agriculture, supermarkets and stores, eating and more.

Yahoo does a fair job with suggestions and concepts.

Special Note about results.

Special Note: The sections on this page describe the searches at the time this page was updated. Results can change day by day as databases are refreshed with new links and corrections. You might not be able to match these results. If your experience is dramatically different or you have questions please contact me - info at websearchguide.ca.