Field Searching

So what if you are looking for something very specific, something you already know is out there? How do you search for that? Lucky for you, there is such a thing as field searching and this is what it does: 

Field searching allows you to specifically search the search engine for a particular Web document.

What does this mean? What it means is that you are able to search even more specifically because you will be targeting a desired result.

TITLE SEARCHING

If you know the title of the article you are looking for, you can simply type it in quotation marks and BOOM! You are done!

     EXAMPLE:    title: "web search tutorial"

If titles have only one word entries, this might not work very well.

DOMAIN SEARCHING

If you are seeking information from a particular kind of site, you may choose to limit your field search to one of the current top level domains (see below, discussed earlier):

• edu -- educational site
• com -- commercial business site
• gov -- U.S. governmental/non-military site
• mil -- U.S. military sites and agencies
• net -- networks, internet service providers, organizations
• org -- U.S. non-profit organizations and others

     EXAMPLE:  domain:edu AND "On the Origin of Species" AND Darwin AND paleontology 
limits your search to educational sites dealing with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.

Some search engines have an advanced search option and will allow you to limit your search to a specific domain by the use of drop-down menus. One, SearchEdu, does it for you by limiting its basic search option to the .edu domain exclusively.

If you are seeking information from a particular international domain, you may choose to search the domain geographically using the two-letter country code.

     EXAMPLE:     domain:UK AND "Edward de Vere 17th Earl of Oxford"

This limits your search to sites in the United Kingdom dealing with the Shakespearean authorship question.

NOTE: Because the Internet was created in this country, US was not originally assigned as a country letter code to U.S. domain names; however, it is used to designate state and local government hosts, including many public schools and some community colleges. Other countries have their own two letter codes as the final part of their hostnames, e.g., UK for United Kingdom; CA for Canada; FR for France, etc.

For a list of Internet Country Codes, go to: ISO's List of Country Codes

HOST (OR SITE) SEARCHING

If you are seeking information that resides on a specific computer or server, you can narrow your search with a "host" or "site" query.

     EXAMPLE:   host:www.sc.edu

returns pages hosted at the University of South Carolina.

URL SEARCHING

If you are seeking a specific file, and that file's name is part of the host site's URL, you may find it more quickly by choosing a URL search.

     EXAMPLE:   url:bck2skol

returns sites in which the filename, bck2skol, (my old course for Internet "newbies") is incorporated into the URL.

LINK SEARCHING

If you have a web page and would like to know who is linking to it, or if you would like to see who is linking to a particular page of interest, you may choose a LINK search.

     EXAMPLE:   link:www.sc.edu/beaufort/

returns pages with links to my campus of the University of South Carolina.

IMAGE SEARCHING

If you want to find a particular image on the web, you may choose an IMAGE search. You will need to specify the image by name, which works well if the name is part of the image file name. If not, you may miss that particular image altogether.

     EXAMPLE:   IMAGE:bones.gif

(Actually, I found the "dancing bones" logo that I use for this tutorial with a Boolean search as follows:  "free gifs" AND bones)