How to Search

• Search Engines:
  
  

  Search Engines	Google	Yahoo	Ask.com
  Boolean: Using AND, OR, or NOT to combine search terms.	Some. Uses an assumed AND between words, and allows OR to be used. For NOT, you must use -.	Yes. Allows AND, OR, NOT searching with parentheses	Some. Uses an assumed AND between words, and allows OR to be used. For NOT, you must use -.
  Truncation: Using a wildcard symbol to abbreviate a search term. war* finds war, wars, warring, etc.	None	None	None
  Limiters: Allow user to limit search to specific dates, locations, or words in the title.	Allows user to limit searches by date, language, domain, and file format.	Some. Limit by language, domain, date.	Some. Limit by major languages, date, and domain.
  Stop Words: Frequently occurring words like and, or, in, of that are ignored when entered as search terms	Yes. (In, or, of, and) To include these words in searches, simply add a + in front of the word.	None	Yes. (In, or, of, and) To include these words in searches, simply add a + in front of the word.
  Phrase Searching: The words must be side by side and in the order given, like Civil War.	Yes. Put the phrase in quotation marks. It will include stop words in phrase searching.	Yes. Put the phrase in quotation marks. It will include stop words in phrase searching.	Yes. Put the phrase in quotation marks. It will include stop words in phrase searching.

• MetaSearch Engines*:
  
  MetaSearch allows the user to search multiple databases with one search.
  
  

  MetaSearch Engines	Clusty / Vivisimo	Dogpile	Mamma
  Directories	Ask, MSN, Gigablast, Looksmart, Open Directory, Wisenut	Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Teoma, Open Directory	About, Ask, Business.com, EntireWeb, Gigablast, Open Directory, Wisenut
  Features	Clusters results by topic, rather than giving a long list of results.	Includes major search engines	Allows user to refine search results.

  
  

*information compiled from Search Engine Showdown. http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/multi