Boolean
Each term may be preceded
by the standard Boolean operators not, and,
or or. If you search for "dogs not pizzas",
you'll find all documents containing the word "dogs" except
those documents which also contain the word "pizzas". If
you type in "and hot and dog and pizzas", you'll find only
those documents which contain all three search terms. The default value
is or. Thus, a search for "hot dog pizzas"
would return pages with at least one of the three terms.
Shorthand
Altavista's shorthand notation
works too. A search on "dogs -hot" is equivalent to the first
example, and "+hot +dog +pizzas" will return the same documents
as the second.
Case Sensitive
If a search term has at
least one capital letter, like "parIS", the search will be
case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing
"parIS" will be found. On the other hand, lowercase words
like "paris" will generate hits from "Paris",
"PARIS", or "parIS".
Quotations
To group a collection of
words, use quotes. For example, the query "Zoltan Milosevic"
(quotes included) would not generate a hit from "Slobodan Milosevic
met with Zoltan Smith". Without quotes, the sentence would count.
Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on '+the +kitten
not "the kitten"' would return only those documents where "the"
and "kitten" appear separately.
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