Expanded Search Tips

The Basic Search
Automatic "and" Queries
"OR " Searches
See Your Search Terms in the Results
Does Capitalization Matter?
Does The Industrial Search Observe Stop Words?
Does The Industrial Search Use Stemming?
Refining Your Search
Excluding Words
Phrase Searches
Restricted Searches
Advanced Operators

The Basic Search

To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant results.

The industrial search uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, the industrial search analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search. The industrial search also prefers pages in which your query terms are near each other.

Note: Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted to HTML for indexing, but the HTML is not displayed.

Automatic "and " Queries

By default, the Industrial Web Search returns only pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and " between terms. For example, to search for bolts specification documents, enter:

To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.

"OR " Searches

The Industrial Web Search supports the logical "OR " operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR " between terms. For example, to search for either bolts or nuts, enter:

See Your Search Terms in the Results

Every Industrial Web search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.

Does Capitalization Matter?

Industrial Web searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "pierre trudeau , " "Pierre Trudeau , " and "Pierre trudeau " all return the same results.

Does The Industrial Search Observe Stop Words?

The Industrial Web search ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles. The Industrial Web search automatically disregards such terms as "where " and "how, " as well as certain single digits and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching. If you want to use stop words in your search, use the "+ " sign or enclose your phrase containing stop words in quotation marks. Make sure that you include a space before the "+ " sign. For example, to search for Annual Report 2003:

Does The Industrial Search Use Stemming?

To provide the most accurate results, the Industrial Search does not use "stemming " or support "wildcard " searches. Rather, the Industrial Search searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box.

For example, searching for "airlin " or "airlin* " will not yield "airline " or "airlines. " If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline " and "airlines. "

Refining Your Search

Since the Industrial Search returns only web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query.

Excluding Words

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ( "- ") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.

For example, the search:

will return pages about tape that do not contain the word "adhesive. "

Phrase Searches

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ( "like this ") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search words.

For example, the search:

is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes. The Industrial Search recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.

Restricted Searches

You may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain ways.

Restrict Type	Query Syntax	Example
to a given location on your site	allinurl: allintitle: inurl: intitle:	allinurl:libertyfastener products
to specific domains	site:	site:libertyfastener.com
to specific file types such as Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, etc.	filetype:pdf	libertyfastener filetype:pdf

Directory Restricting

To restrict the directories searched, enter a URL that drills down through the directory structure to the directories or files to be searched. For example, the query frasers.com/images/ restricts the search to everything at the manual level. If the trailing slash is not included, as in tape frasers.com/images, then all subdirectories are also searched.

Advanced Operators

The Industrial Web search supports several advanced operators, which are query words with special functions. A list of the advanced operators with explanations is here.

info:
The query info: returns all information available for that particular URL. For instance, info:www.intertechnology.com shows information about the Intertechnology homepage. There can be no space between the info: and the web page URL.

site:
If you include site: in your query, the results are restricted to those web sites in the given domain. For instance, help site:www.intertechnology.com finds pages about help within www.intertechnology.com. help site:com finds pages about help within .com URLs.

Note: There can be no space between the "site: " and the domain.

allintitle:
If you start a query with allintitle:, the results are restricted to documents with all of the query words in the document's HTML title. For example, allintitle:frasers returns only documents that have "frasers" in the HTML title.

intitle:
If you include intitle: in your query, the search is restricted to results with documents containing that word in the HTML title. For example, intitle:frasers vertical returns documents that mention the word "frasers " and "vertical" in their HTML title, and mention the word "vertical " anywhere in the document either in the title or anywhere else in the document.

Note: There can be no space between the "intitle: " and the following word.

Putting intitle: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allintitle: at the front of your query. For example, intitle:frasers intitle:vertical is the same as allintitle: frasers vertical.

allinurl:
If you start a query with allinurl:, the search is restricted to results with all of the query words in the URL. For example, allinurl: industry publications returns only documents that have both "industry " and "publications " in the URL.

Note: allinurl: works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, allinurl: foo/bar restricts the results to pages with the words "foo " and "bar " in the URL, but doesn't require that they be separated by a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent, or that they be in that particular word order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints.

inurl:
If you include inurl: in your query, the results are restricted to documents containing that word in the URL. For example, inurl:industry publications returns documents that mention the word industry " in their URL and mention the word "publications " anywhere in the document either in the URL or anywhere else in the document.

Note: There can be no space between the "inurl: " and the following word.

Note: inurl: works on words, not URL components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, in the query frasers inurl:foo/bar, the inurl: operator affects only the word "foo, " which is the single word following the inurl: operator, and does not affect the word "bar. " The query frasers inurl:foo inurl:bar can be used to require both "foo " and "bar " to be in the URL.

Putting inurl: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allinurl: at the front of your query. For example, inurl:frasers inurl:search is the same as allinurl: frasers search.