Each term may be preceded by the standard Boolean operators
not, and, or or. If you search for
"dogs not greyhounds", you'll find all documents
containing the word "dogs" except those
documents which also contain the word "greyhounds". If
you type in "and miniature and dogs and greyhound", you'll find
only those documents which contain all three search
terms. The default value is or. Thus, a search for
"miniature dogs greyhounds" would return pages with at least
one of the three terms.
Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "dogs
-greyhounds" is equivalent to the first example, and "+miniature
+dogs +greyhounds" will return the same documents as the second.
If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "Trainer",
the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is,
only documents containing "Trainer" will be found. On the other
hand, lowercase words like "trainer" will generate hits
from "Trainer", "TRAINER", or "trainER".
To group a collection of words, use quotes. For example, the query
"Dog Trainer" (quotes included) would not generate a hit
from "Dog met with Trainer". Without quotes,
the sentence would count. Boolean operators can also
act on quotations: a search on '+the +dog not "the
dog"' would return only those documents where
"the" and "dog" appear separately.
GreyHound 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.
These rules are based on
Altavista's query syntax; a look at their
Search Tips may prove useful. The original
Simple Search was created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt's Script
Archive.
The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It
cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the
first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters
or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used
in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters.
A search for "th*" would be ignored.
