Refining search results using quotes, plus and minus

Search like you mean it

Search

// you’re reading...

Technique

Refining search results using quotes, plus and minus

By Simon Goudie ⋅ November 29, 2007 ⋅ Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The number of results returned by a search engine can be truly immense, with most common searches giving hundreds of thousands of options to choose from, if not millions. Some of these results are relevant, some less so and some completely off target. To improve the relevance of your results, it helps to be a bit more specific with your query. Using quote marks, plus signs and minus signs are a good way to do this.

Quotation marks

Say you wanted to search for boysenberry juice. Just typing boysenberry juice into a search engine indicates that you are looking for pages that are relevant to the words ‘boysenberry’ and/or ‘juice’, so your search results may end up including items on different juices, or growing boysenberries. In fact, Google brings back 91,100 results for this query, which may be fine if we were looking for general information about berries or juices, but not in this situation.

Trying the search again, this time by putting the terms in quotes, “boysenberry juice”, narrows this number down to 2,630. That’s still a lot of results, but we are heading in the right direction. The quotes indicate that we are looking for pages relevant to the term ‘boysenberry juice’ as a single entity, not two separate terms. The results this time would include pages specifically mentioning ‘boysenberry juice’ or pages that may include those two words in sequence; basically anywhere the exact phrase ‘boysenberry juice’ appears.

Quotes are also a great way to search for a term or phrase that may be made up of other common terms. Song lyrics are a good example of this, as are famous quotations or other longer pieces of information. There are over two million hits for I don’t like raspberries, but only around two thousand for “I don’t like raspberries”.

Plus

Quotes are effective when searching for a string of information, but if the terms you are looking for aren’t necessarily in a set order, the plus sign may be a better way to reduce your search results. The plus sign in front of a search term indicates that the results must contain that word. A search for horses pineapples turns up roughly 1.5 million results that feature horses, pineapples and both horses and pineapples, while a search for +horses +pineapples returns only 166,000 results that deal with both horses and pineapples.

This concept can be added to any other search; for example, the search terms “I don’t like raspberries” +horses narrows down the two thousand results we found earlier about raspberries to just three entries.

Minus

Working in the opposite way to the plus sign, the minus sign lets you specify which terms you don’t want appearing in your results. This can be useful if what you are searching for has more than one meaning, such as the mobile device BlackBerry and the fruit. It also allows you to filter out many results that appear as you refine your search. Searching for berries, in this example, gives thirteen million results, but when we request only pages that do not contain the term ‘raspberries’ by searching for berries -raspberries, we can reduce this to just over two million results.

Refining search results

You will probably have noticed that the number of results that these example searches have returned are still very large; however, by using a combination of the above techniques and progressively refining your search terms, you will begin to reduce these numbers and also start bringing more relevant results to the top of the list. This refinement saves time wading through many results and helps when trying to find obscure or specific pieces of information.