Yahoo! Hacks

Save Time with Search Shortcuts

By using a few specific keywords, you can have Yahoo! answer common questions within your search results, provide specific information, or point directly to your answer.

At its most basic, Yahoo! Search allows you to type in search terms, click the Search button, and receive documents that include that word or phrase from across the Web. This makes Yahoo! a keyword search engine, and knowing this can help you put together your queries.

Yahoo! Search accepts a number of key phrases that can provide quick answers to common questions. To illustrate, here’s an example in which search shortcuts can give you a faster answer than keywords alone.

Imagine you’re in California and you’d like to call a friend in London, England. You can’t remember the time difference and you don’t want to call at 3 a.m. London time, so you turn to Yahoo! for help. Browsing to http://search.yahoo.com, you find yourself in front of the search form, about to type. What’s the best query? If you were asking a human being for the answer you might be tempted to type in a complete question: what is the time in London?.

Because Yahoo! Search looks for matching words or phrases, you’ve told Yahoo! to find documents that include the words in your phrase. So the top results will likely be the web site for the London newspaper The Times and other documents that contain the search terms London and time. You’ll probably find your answer at sites that are in the results, but there’s a much faster ...