Most search engines offer extra features to enhance your keyword searches. Please see the Overview of Search Engine Features to see which search engines have these features.

Here's how each feature works:

Typing quotation marks (" ") around a phrase will force the engine to interpret it as a phrase rather than as separate words. For example, putting quotation marks around "the prime minister of Canada" will force the search engine to look for results with all those words in exactly that order.

Typing + and - signs in front of keywords marks them as essential (+) or excludes them (-) from your search. For example, experiment research mice mouse +cancer -pet would make sure that "cancer" is in all the pages found, and that "pet" is in none of them.

Wildcards are used to search for many different forms of a keyword. By adding an asterisk (*) at the end of a word, such as in program*, the search engine will look for "program" as well as "programme," "programming" and "programmability."

Boolean operators must be typed in upper-case letters.

Use AND to ensure that all the keywords you typed in are present in the search results. Ex. dogs AND breeding

Use OR to ensure that at least one of the keywords is present in the search results. Example: pets OR animals

Use NOT to ensure that a keyword does not show up in the search results. Some search engines, such as AltaVista, require that NOT be used in conjunction with AND. Therefore, while pets AND NOT cats would be allowed, pets NOT cats would not be properly interpreted.

NEAR is used to ensure that two keywords are within ten words of each other in the search results. Example: Eleanor NEAR Roosevelt

brackets ( )

Brackets can be used to group keywords using Boolean operators to create more specific searches. For example, to find documents that contain the word "breeding" or the words "care" and "animals," enter the following: breeding OR (care AND animals)

*Yahoo! is a directory. Their small search engines look for keywords in category headings, titles and summaries of Web sites rather than in the full text of indexed Web pages.