11. Field searching

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When the search engine robots retrieve information from webpages around the world, they sort the information into various categories or "fields". The main fields that can be accessed in field searching are:

Title: This is the text you can read in the bar at the top of the browser window (not the main headline on the webpage itself). The title normally contains important keywords referring to the content of the page. If you restrict your search to the page titles, you will get fewer -- but more focused -- hits. You could for instance search for petunias AND title:gardening.

URL: This is the address (the Uniform Resource Locator) of a page, e.g. http://www.pandia.com/. You may restrict you search to pages with addresses that contain a certain word. If you want to restrict your search to the Pandia tutorial, you can do a search like this: "field searching" AND url:pandia.com/goalgetter.

Domains: The domain is the unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names have two or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. Cf. yahoo.com and pandia.com. The domain name is normally part of the Web and email address.

Some search engines allow you to restrict your search to a specific domain. By doing a domain-search you may for instance restrict your search to pages in a specific country. British pages normally end in the letters .uk. A search for Jaguar AND car AND domain:.uk should give you British pages containing information on the Jaguar car.

There are also some top level domains (com, org, net etc.) that are not restricted to specific countries, although they are predominantly American. You can use these endings to restrict your search to commercial (.com), US educational (.edu), US governmental (.gov) or US military (.mil) sites.

Our Q-cards have details on how to do these and other forms of field searching with the various search engines.

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