search tips and examples   Be Specific The more specific you are in searching, the better results you will get. For example, if you are looking for a new car, you will have more success if you specify the make and model that you are interested in, rather than just typing in the word "car". Check your spelling When typing your search, be sure to check your spelling. Search engines treat keywords very literally when finding matching Web sites. If you misspell a word and search by accident, that's o.k. You can easily search again with the correct spelling using the search box found on the search results page. Use more than one word With searching, the more words you use, the better. Using more words will generate more targeted results, which will save you the hassle of looking through several Web pages to find the right one. The My Global Search search engine uses all of the words you type in to search for Web pages. This means that we will only show you Web pages that contain all of the words that you specify. Click on the Search button below to see how well it works... search the web    Use capital letters to avoid lowercase matches By using capital letters at the beginning of search terms, you are searching for web pages that contain only capitalized versions of your search terms. For example, a search for White House would only turn up web pages where those words are capitalized and will ignore pages that contain the same words in all lowercase. To see how this works, click the Search button below... search the web    Use quotes to search for exact phrases If you have an exact set of words that you are searching for, use quotation marks around these words when searching. Quotation marks tell the search engine to find only those Web sites that contain your search terms in the exact order that you type them in. Click the Search button below to see, or type in your own phrase. search the web    Use minus signs to exclude keywords Plus + and minus - symbols can be used to include or exclude search keywords. We've designed our search engine to automatically add a plus + sign to every word you enter. If you want to keep one or more words from appearing in your search results, just add a minus - symbol before each keyword you would like to exclude. Try this example to see... search the web    Use metawords to search for something specific Metawords give special instructions to the search engine and allow you to search for specific Web page characteristics. For instance, you can use the metaword title: to search for Web page titles of a particular name. When using metawords, you should always separate the metaword and your first search term with a colon, but with no spaces in between. Metawords can also be used to exclude Web pages by placing a minus - symbol before the metaword. You can use any of the following metawords with our search engine: title: Allows you to locate or exclude web pages by title domain: Allows you to locate or exclude web pages by url domain link: Allows you to locate web pages that contain links to a specific url The following example uses the metaword title to search for civil war sites. search the web    This example makes use of the metaword domain to search for government web sites. search the web    Try searching with a Boolean term Boolean terms are capitalized words that require certain keywords to be included or excluded from your search results. These work very similarly to the plus + and minus - symbols. You can use any of the following Booleans when searching: AND OR AND NOT search the web    Use wildcard symbols when you're not sure Wildcards are very handy when you are not exactly sure of the syntax or spelling of what you are looking for. The asterisk * symbol can be used at any point in your search to look for a string of unknown letters or characters. The question mark ? can be used at any point to search for a single unknown letter or character. You can use as many wildcard symbols in a search as you need to, so long as your search includes at least three adjacent characters that are not wildcard symbols. For example, the search grand* will return Web pages that contain the words grandparents, Grand Banks, and so on. An example of a search using the question mark is william shakesp??re. Question marks are particularly helpful when you are not sure of the spelling of a particular word. Try it for yourself... search the web    Add words to refine your search If you have searched for something but still haven't found the right Web page, use the My Global Search Search box found on the right hand side of the search results page. We make it simple to refine your search by remembering the words you've just searched with. You can easily add words to this search box to further refine your search or to start a new search.