SMART Technologies

Search Tips

The Basic Search

To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant results.

Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages where your query terms are near each other.

Spelling

A single spelling suggestion is returned with the results for search terms where the spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.

The spell checker is context sensitive. For example, if the query submitted is gail divers, gail devers is suggested as an alternative query. However, scuba divers would not return an alternate query suggestion.

Note: Currently, the spell checker supports only U.S. English.

Synonyms

Synonyms are words that have the same or similar meanings as your search terms. They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the results page. Alternatively, place a tilde ("~") immediately in front of your search term. For example, to search for eateries in Calgary, enter ~restaurant Calgary as your search terms. This will return results that include diners, pubs, hotels, cafés and restaurants in Calgary.

Sorting by Date

The Sort by Date feature sorts and presents your search results based on date. The date of each file is returned in the results. Results that do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted by relevance. This feature is accessed by clicking on the Advanced Search link.

Automatic "and" Queries

By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include and between terms. To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.

"OR" Searches

Google supports the logical OR operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase OR between terms. For example, to search for an office in either London or Paris, enter office London OR Paris.

What Is Stemming, and Does Google Use It?

Stemming refers to using only part of a word in a search.

To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use stemming or support "wildcard" searches (a synonym of stemming). Rather, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box.

For example, searching for airlin or airlin* will not yield airline or airlines. If in doubt, try different searches using both forms: airline and airlines.

Refining Your Search

Since Google only returns Web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original, broad query.

Excluding Words

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign, but not after.

For example, the search bass -music will return pages about bass that do not contain the word music.

Phrase Searches

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters also serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotation marks because they join your search words in the same way as double quotes.

Restricted Searches

You may also narrow searches by restricting your queries.

Advanced Operators

Google Search supports several advanced operators, which are query words with special functions. A list of the advanced operators and explanations are provided below.

cache:

The search engine keeps the text of the many documents it searches available in a backed-up format known as a cache. A cached version of a Web page can be retrieved if the original page is unavailable (for example, the page's server is down). The cached page appears exactly as it looked when the crawler last crawled it and includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.



The query cache: shows the cached version of the Web page. For instance, cache:www.google.com shows the cached page of Google's homepage.



NOTE: There can be no space between cache: and the URL in the query.



If you include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted within the cached document. For instance, cache:www.google.com press releases shows the cached content with the words press and releases highlighted.



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info:

The query info: returns all information available for that particular URL. For instance, info:www.google.com shows information about the Google homepage.


NOTE: there can be no space between info: and the URL.



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site:

If you include site: in your query, the results are restricted to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] finds pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] finds pages about help within .com URLs.


NOTE: There can be no space between site: and the domain.



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link:

The query link: enables you to restrict your search to pages that link to the query page. To do this, use link: in the search box. For example, to find all links to Stanford's main page, enter link:www.stanford.edu.


NOTE: there can be no space between link: and the URL.



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allintitle:

If you start a query with allintitle:, the results are restricted to documents with all of the query words in the document's HTML title. For example, allintitle: google search only returns documents that have both google and search in the HTML title.



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intitle:

If you include intitle: in your query, the search is restricted to results with documents containing that word in the HTML title.

For example, intitle:google search returns documents that mention the word google in their HTML title, and mention the word search in the document, either in the title or elsewhere in the document.


NOTE: There can be no space between intitle: and the following word. Also, putting intitle: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allintitle: at the front of your query. For example, intitle:google intitle:search is the same as allintitle: google search.



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allinurl:

If you start a query with allinurl:, the search is restricted to results with all of the query words in the URL. For example, allinurl: google search returns only documents that have both google and search in the URL.


NOTE: The allinurl: operator works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, allinurl: foo/bar restricts the results to pages with the words foo and bar in the URL, but doesn't require that the words be separated by a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent or that they be in that particular order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints.



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inurl:

If you include inurl: in your query, the results are restricted to documents containing that word in the URL. For example, inurl:google search returns documents that mention the word google in their URL and mention the word search anywhere in the document, either in the URL or elsewhere in the document.


NOTE: There can be no space between inurl: and the following word.


NOTE: inurl: works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, in the query google inurl:foo/bar, the inurl: operator affects only the word foo, which is the single word following the inurl: operator, and does not affect the word bar.


The query google inurl:foo inurl:bar can be used to require both foo and bar to be in the URL. Also, putting inurl: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allinurl: at the front of your query. For example, inurl:google inurl:search is the same as allinurl: google search.