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.
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.
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".
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.
Intermediate Search finds words, not strings. A search for "in"
would turn up only that word, not "bin", "inside",
or "acquaintance". To perform a string search,
preface your term with the dollar sign - a query on "$in"
would find all words lists above. Note that more complex wildcard
searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the
asterisk in your query will return a list of all files, but that's
its only function.
