Building Queries - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 80

you don't need to add anything to the query words to make sure they're
included in the query. If you want to make sure they're not included in the
query, however, put a minus (-) sign in front of them. And to make sure that
words appear only as a phrase, group them with quotes.
Take for example the following query: “cardiac arrest” treatment pre-
vention -”heart attack” . his phrase would return results for “cardiac
arrest” and include the words treatment and prevention but would exclude
any pages that also had the phrase “heart attack” .
tIp
Be sure to use great caution when excluding words! the example
above was designed to ind medical professional-level results—in
other words, Web pages whose audience of medical professionals
would refer to “cardiac arrest” instead of a “heart attack.” if you
run this same search, you'll ind that the results are from sources
like professional medical journals, the american heart associa-
tion, hospitals, and so forth. it's high-level information—just
removing one phrase wiped out a whole level of results. Very
powerful, but also very damaging if you use it inappropriately.
Special Searching Syntax
When you enter a plain query word in a search box, the search engine looks
for that word anywhere on a page. It will look in the title of the page or in
the body of the page. One way to reduce your number of results further is to
use special syntax that limits where the search engine will look for a word.
Search engines vary in the kinds of special syntax they ofer, but in this sec-
tion you'll ind some almost-universal syntax you can use in your searches.
In addition, look in the search engine's Help documents for information on
the right way to express the syntax.
the title syntax
To use the special title syntax on Google and Yahoo, you enter intitle:key-
word . his syntax restricts your searching to the title of a Web page. It's use-
ful when you don't have many words by which to limit your topic. Instead,
you're limiting where your word might be found. When your word is found
in the title of a Web page, the page usually contains a lot of information
about that keyword.