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Refining a Search
It's easy to refine a query (search request) to get precisely the results you want. Here are some effective techniques to try:
Before: | home run records |
After: | "home run" records |
The before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for the home page of songs like "Run, Run, Run" or baseball statistics? Identifying "home run" as a phrase eliminates the ambiguity. This is the most powerful query refinement technique.
Add a discriminating word or a phrase
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Before: | "home run" records |
After: | "home run" records baseball |
As before, the before query is ambiguous. Adding baseball makes the query less ambiguous. You'll get more total matches (because the query is broadened with an additional term), but the relevance ranking will be better.
Capitalize when appropriate
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Before: | wired digital white house, baby bells, bill gates |
After: | Wired, Digital, White House, Baby Bells, Bill Gates |
These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible interpretations. For example, without capitalization, wired could refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could refer to the Bells' children on the "Young and the Restless." Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-)
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Before: | Barney |
After: | Barney, +Smith -dinosaur |
Barney alone is ambiguous. Is it looking for Smith Barney investment information or cartoon dinosaur pages? You can use the reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation. Or, you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document. The after version above does both.
Before: | "398 Report" |
After: | +"398 Report" +site:svartifoss2.fcc.gov, +title:children |
If you know the site domain or title of the page that you are looking for, you can use the site: or title: field specifier to search for the word or phrase in the site or title of the page. See Special Searches for more information on field specifiers.
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