Page:Untangling the Web.pdf/35

  Learn the search syntax of the search engines you use (never assume). Most search engines use double quotes ("") to enclose a phrase and the plus + and minus - keys to indicate "must include" and "must exclude" respectively. But these are by no means universal rules (especially when using international or metasearch engines).

The default operator for all major US search engines is now AND. As of February 2002, no major search engine used OR as its default operator. However, most search engines will let you use an OR in the simple search box: Yahoo and Google permit OR searches in the simple search box, but you must capitalize the OR.

Keep in mind that because HTML does not have a "date" tag, "date" can mean many things: creation date; the last modified date for the page; or the date search engine found the page. I do not recommend searching by date except when using weblog, news, or newsgroup search engines.

Rh