Search engine question

[CharlesL]

A couple of years ago, if you wanted to search for my dog has fleas for instance, you would enter it as "my+dog+has+fleas", and it would find any entries that had that exact phrase in it.

Now, it seems, the search will show you anything with 'my', 'dog', 'has', 'fleas'. So you get 36 million hits. Anything with any SINGLE word in your phrase will show up.

Does anyone know of a way to narrow the search, besides the suggestions the search engines give us?

 

[Mike Labbe]

It depends on the particular search engine, but generally "MY DOG HAS FLEAS" (quotation marks) will tell it they have to be together and in that exact order.

Mike

 

[Ron Eggers]

That's the way Google works.

I didn't even realize there WERE other search engines until I started submitting my web site. There must be thousands!

 

[Rozmataz]

You learn something new every day! Thank you for this one.... I didn't know to put in quotations. Helps narrow the field...

Ron, are you signing up for any of these other search engines?!? How's that work.

Roz

 

[Mecianne]

You can also do the Advanced search on Google. Type in your phrase and select the option "exact phrase". It gives you lots of other options as well...languages, dates, etc.

 

[Bill Henry-]

Alta Vista still allows you to search the old fashioned way, I think.

I believe on their “advanced” search you can add Boolean expressions like, “NOT”, “NEAR”, etc. which can greatly reduce the stuff you don’t need.

 

[Ron Eggers]

Ron, are you signing up for any of these other search engines?!? How's that work.

My web host includes a utility to facilitate submission to a whole ****-load of search engines. After I did that, I got emails from most of them requiring that I confirm the information, but it was pretty straight forward. Quite if few of them invited me to purchase preferred placement, which I will not do.

I think there are third-party utilities that work the same way.

 

[Lance E]

With Google you can still use the minus as well e.g. to exclude the results with DOG then add -dog to the seach string, the | still works as an "or" option also.