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.