Rick
Unregistered User
(8/30/02 3:46 am)
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Ixquick Introduction
Power Search Techniques
Ixquick's metasearch engine ably handles basic and advanced searches.
Ixquick knows which search engines can handle phrases, boolean logic, wildcards and more, and Ixquick will only translate and then forward your search to engines that can accommodate your search's complexity.
Search feature How to compose this search
As many of the terms as possible:
refreshing strawberry smoothie
Separate unadorned search terms with spaces to search for pages with as many of the terms as possible. Ixquick will try to find pages containing all your words and phrases, but Ixquick will settle for some of those words if that is impossible.
All of the terms:
+UFO +abduction
or,
UFO and abduction
Place a plus (+) before any word that must be included. Alternatively, place the word AND between two words or phrases that must be included. Ixquick will only return pages that contain all those words.
If some words are mandatory but others are optional, place the + before only the mandatory words (for example, green +jello +pudding if you are less concerned about the color but are aching for a tasty jello pudding).
Omit a term:
dinosaur -barney
Place a minus (-) before any word that must not be present. Alternatively, place the words NOT, AND NOT or AND NOT before that word.
For example,dinosaur - barney if you are looking for pages on dinosaurs but don't want to find Barney the Dinosaur.
Phrase:
"south park"
Place a phrase in quotes if all the words need to appear together as a phrase, and not scattered about the page. For example, a search for "south park" is more likely to find websites devoted to the violent television show South Park and less likely to find pages about parks located in the south of France.
Capitalization:
TidBITS
shoes
Type your search words in all lowercase if you don't care whether the results are capitalized or not(case insensitive). If you do care, and are looking for the Macintosh publication TidBITS, type your desired capital and lowercase letters to avoid words that aren't capitalized the same way (case sensitive).
Wildcards:
brit*
The asterisk (*) represents a wildcard, meaning a placeholder for zero or more unknown characters. It is useful when you don't remember an exact name or phrase or when you want to retrieve variants on a word.
For example, the search brit* might return sites discussing Britney Spears and sites discussing Britain.
Parentheses:
adopt and(beagle or terrier)
Construct complex queries by mixing ands, ors and nots within parentheses. A search for adopt and (beagle or terrier) would find pages with the words adopt and beagle, or adopt and terrier, or possibly all three words.
Near:
president NEAR"special friend"
Find terms that appear on a page together and are close to each other.
Natural Language:
Who is Darth Vader's son?
How can I get rich with no money down?
Ask your question the way you would ask a friend, and Ixquick will pass that question on to search engines that can handle natural language searches.
Fields:
+title:"Dan Quayle" +mensa
+domain:uk +beatles
host:nytimes.com
image:clouds
url igman
link:nytimes
text:"snazzy shoes"
related:www.apple.com
Specify where certain information must appear with fields. Currently supported fields include:
title: page title must contain this text
domain: page must be located at a .com or .gov or .edu or .uk (etc.) computer
host: page must be located on this specified computer or on more specific computers (e.g. host:nytimes.com will retrieve pages on nytimes.com and on www.nytimes.com)
image: page must contain an image whose file name contains the specified text.
url: find pages with specified text anywhere within the url, e.g. url:uk will find abc.com/pics/uk.html as well as www.uk/
link: page must contain a hyperlink for which at least one of the words in the destination address begins with specified text.
text: actual text displayed on the page must contain specified text (otherwise the text might appear in the title or in the hypertext code but not on the page)
related: find sites with similar content to the specified page
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