SEARCH
HELP
This Section is designed to give you tips for getting the
best results from our Search Engine. If you need help in any other
areas, please visit our Main Help Center.
Refinement - Find
sites in specific countries only
The search engine searches worldwide automatically (No
Refinement). If you want to narrow your search to a specific country, simply choose the relevant country from the drop-down
Refinement box.
The same applies when browsing categories in the
Directory. After entering your category, choose the Refinement option
at the bottom of each page and click on the "Reload" button to see
sites from the selected country only.
Case Sensitivity
Search words or phrases containing an upper case character
are treated as case
sensitive. In other words, a search for "internet" will match "Internet",
"INTERNET", and "InTerNet", while the search term "INTERNET"
would match only links with INTERNET (in uppercase) in them.
Advanced Searches
Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what
you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:
| SYMBOL |
TRANSLATION |
EXAMPLES |
USAGE |
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+ / and |
Require this term |
+internet |
Will only display listings that contain the word "internet" |
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- |
Forbid this term |
-web
+internet -web |
Will only display listings that DO NOT contain the word "web" |
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or |
Prefer this term |
+internet or web |
This will find all listings containing "internet", and will rank those that
also contain the word "web" a bit higher. (since web is "preferred") |
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|
" " |
Exactly match this phrase |
"Internet Help" |
This will find all listing that contain the phrase "Internet Help". Note
that using the quote marks forces the engine into a case-sensitive search. |
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url: |
Find all entries belonging to a given domain or matching a file name |
url:www.site.com url:*asp |
The top example will return all entries in the www.mysite.com
domain. The lower example shows how you could find every .asp page listed in the engine. |
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mailto: |
Find all entries submitted by a person with this
e-mail address |
mailto:jim@site.com mailto:jim@si* |
This is a convenience search, if you know who posted a link (or want to see if a
certain person has posted any links) this is how you'd find them. |
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* |
Match anything |
inter* |
You can use the asterisk as a "wildcard" to match parts of a word. In our
example, the search would return any listing with any word starting with
"inter". The asterisk does have one limitation: it cannot span words - that is,
the query "mat*arts" would not match the first sentence of this description -
and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the
asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three characters, so a
search for "th*" or "an*" would be ignored.
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