Help for Simple Web Search (Part 2)
Previous: How to find what you are looking for
On the previous help page we took a brief look at performing effective searches. Bear in mind of course that you can combine several of the options we looked at earlier and explore other opportunities. You will find some of these below:
- Require and exclude terms
- The search we offer is, as mentioned earlier, an AND search. This means that if you enter many search words and/or phrases, the pages you get a hit on will contain all the words and/or phrases in your search. If you want to search for the phrase/term life expectancy among the elderly (i.e. the document should contain the term elderly in addition to the phrase life expectancy), but you do no want to include documents containing the word europe you can search in the following manner:
- link: followed by the Internet address (link:Internet address)
- Find web pages that have at least one link to the web page's Internet address (URL). Our example finds web pages with at least one pointer to
http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/peaceful-world-awaits.html
This allows you to check for example how many pages have inserted a link to a certain web page. - url: followed by the Internet address (url:Internet address)
- By using url: followed by the Internet address, you will find web pages with the Internet address you have entered. If you want to find an Internet address containing a specific term you can type in url: followed by the actual term. We will look at an example that does both. We want to find web pages with the Internet address www.apollon.uio.no that ALSO include the term viking in the address:
- title: followed by a term (title:term)
- If you want to find web pages with a specific word in the title (which presupposes that the title tag is used), you can do so by typing in title: followed by the term. If you want to search for web pages with the word genes in the title, then you would enter:
-
A web page coded as follows:
<TITLE>EDITORIAL: Holy Genes</TITLE>
will be found by such a search. - description: followed by the term (description:term)
- Finds web pages with the word test in the meta element description. You can also replace "description" with the name of other meta elements, such as keywords, date.created, etc. In our example we will search for web pages with the word test in the meta element description.
A web page with the following meta element:
<META name="description" content="Time and place for the test"> will be found by such a search. - UiO's web page search gives you the opportunity to combine several of these elements and refine your searches as much as possible. UiO has hundreds of thousands of documents, so good searches are a necessity. Effective searching requires practice. Set aside some time then to test out the various functions, so that you can quickly find any document you need in the future.
Advanced Web Page Search
If you want to refine your search even more, you can perform an advanced web page search. You can for example exclude personal home pages (everything located under the Internet address folk.uio.no) and association web pages (everything located under the Internet address foreninger.uio.no) by selecting that the search should only apply to official pages at UiO.