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Yahoo! Hacks
book

Yahoo! Hacks

by Paul Bausch
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
489 pages
12h 2m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Yahoo! Hacks

Fine-Tune Yahoo! Web Search Queries

By understanding how to phrase your searches, you’ll find more relevant search results.

Using Yahoo! Web Search (http://search.yahoo.com) is deceptively simple. You can type in any word or phrase and find matches in documents across the Web. The trade-off for this simplicity is having to look through hundreds, thousands, or millions of results to find the documents that are actually useful to you. By understanding how Yahoo! expects queries to be phrased, you can limit the results to include only those documents most relevant to you—saving you the time of looking through extraneous results.

Search Basics

To start building sophisticated queries, you need to know the basics. The following search basics will help you refine your Yahoo! searches:

Keyword

By default, Yahoo! searches for all of the words you type into a search form. If you type grammar into the search form, Yahoo! will return documents that contain the word grammar. A search for grammar school will return documents that contain both words somewhere within the document, but not necessarily together.

Complete phrase

To search for words in a specific order, enclose the words in quotation marks. A search for "grammar school" will return documents that contain the complete phrase grammar school. You can combine keyword and phrase searches. To find documents that contain the phrase grammar school and also have the word Oregon somewhere in the document, you could search for "grammar school" Oregon ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009453Errata Page