Advanced Search Features

Tips for better searching

• Capitalise (ie. a capital first letter) names and titles, such as December and Star Wars.
• Use double quotation marks or hyphens to group words that are part of a phrase. eg. "Rugby World Cup".
• Place a plus sign in front of words that must be in documents found by the search. Do not put a space between the plus sign and the word. eg. "Rugby World Cup" +Wales.
• Place a minus sign in front of words that should not appear in any documents found by the search. Do not put a space between the minus sign and the word. eg. "World Cup" -football.
• Narrow down your results by refining your query.
• If you're entering terms with symbols and numbers (eg. C++, 100 BC) you will probably have less luck than if you choose words eg. "programming languages", "ancient history".
• Use a wildcard - ie. an asterisk * - after a keyword. For example, bank* should find you bankers or banking.
• To restrict the results of your search to UK sites only type in domain:uk after your keywords, or try some of the UK based search engines listed below.

Contents: World Wide Web

Skill Check: World Wide Web