Whenever you search, most search engines include the number of pages matching your search. Quite often, this number is in the thousands or even millions. This can become overwhelming with useless stuff too. Most punctuation characters act as a space, which separates text into individual words.
Here are some tricks to refine your search queries.
AND (all terms)
The AND operator requires both terms must be present in the web page to be listed. In simple terms, when we search for the phrase web page:
- if web gets 1,000,000 results
- and page gets 500,000 results
- web OR page should get 1,455,000
- while web AND page might only get 45,000 results
OR (any one or more terms)
This would be useful if your searching for something with 2 possible names.
quotes (exact phrase)
Using quotes during your search keeps your list more accurate. By quoting a phrase, the search returns to you, only pages containing that exact phrase. This would be great if you're searching for a person with a common name. I use quotes a lot for better search engine results.
NOT (exclude terms)
Use this if you get lots of results skewed toward a subject you aren't searching for. For instance, you might search for Dinosaurs, but get inundated with Barney the Dinosaur. Sometimes you might use the form -SearchTerm instead.