How To Search/Yahoo
- Purpose: "Our mission is to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses." [1]
- Audience: All Internet users.
- Scope: The Internet. All documents that Yahoo's web crawling software can process.
- Refresh Rate: Constant
- Other Information: It is important to differentiate between Yahoo! Search, which this page is about, and the Yahoo web site directory. Yahoo! Search is a fully automated Internet search engine. (Although it seems to incorporate a few "Yahoo! Shortcuts," listed below, that may be human indexed.) On the other hand each web page in the web site directory is categorized by humans, it is not automated.
Boolean Operators
[edit | edit source]| Boolean Operator |
Syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
| AND | {Default} | skunk tomato
|
| OR | OR | skunk OR tomato
|
| NOT | - | skunk -tomato
|
Other Operators
[edit | edit source]| Syntax | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| "" | "skunk smell removal"
|
phrase search |
| + | skunk +and tomato
|
include a common word that Google usually does not search |
Search Fields
[edit | edit source]Yahoo! refers to the following as "Search Meta Words."
| Syntax | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| site: | site:wikibooks.org "how to search"
|
searches web pages that have the specified domain |
| hostname: | hostname:en.wikibooks.org "how to search"
|
searches web pages that have the specified hostname |
| link: | link:wikibooks.org
|
searches web pages that link to the specified URL |
| url: | url:http://www.wikibooks.org
|
searches the Yahoo index for the specified URL; this should return either 0 or 1 results |
| inurl: | inurl:wikibooks
|
searches web pages that contain the specified text (wikibooks) somewhere in the URL |
| intitle: | intitle:wikibooks
|
searches web pages that have the specified word in the title |
Search Shortcuts
[edit | edit source]Yahoo refers to the following as Yahoo! Shortcuts. Some have yet to be listed in this wikibook.
When typing a shortcut it looks just like a normal word search. The difference shows up when the search results appear. Below advertisements and above the numbered search results there will be an entry with a red Yahoo Y next to it. This shortcut entry may provide an answer, if using the calculator or dictionary, or it may link to further pages with the answer.
| Shortcut | Description | Example | Further Information |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculator | Allows calculations to be done from the search box. | 45*12
|
45*12 |
| Definitions | Defines words | define numeral
|
define numeral |
Other Features
[edit | edit source]Yahoo! Search also allows a number of searches which can only be done using templates on their web pages. These can be found in the advanced search. These include file format (doc, html, pdf, ppt, rss, txt, xls), search language, safesearch filter, and country.
Other features not directly impacting search results include number of results listed per page.