How do quotation marks affect a search result

It's one of the best ways to limit the pages returned. Example: "Be nice to nerds". Of course, you must have the phrase exactly right -- and if your memory is as good as mine, that can be problematic. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more.

Do quotation marks have any effect on the search engine robots? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 10 months ago. Active 8 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 3k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. For example, a search for car buyers females statistics does not return nearly as good a set of results as car buyers female statistics.

The asterisk acts as a wildcard character and allows you to omit one or more words in a search phrase. This is useful in multiple ways. The asterisk is even more helpful when used within an exact phrase search. This is an exception to the wildcard use case. Your Google search can span a numerical range; you indicate the range by using two dots between two numbers, which could be years, dollar amounts, or any other numerical value.

For example, a search for confidential business plan As a shortcut, you can leave off the high end and Google will assume infinity. For example, Use Other than these special characters wildcard and range indicators , most punctuation gets ignored. An important exception is the hyphen. A search query of on-site consulting will be interpreted as onsite consulting OR on-site consulting OR on site consulting.

The hyphen indicates a strong relationship between two words; the underscore symbol also connects two words under most conditions. Another important exception is the apostrophe, which is matched exactly if contained within the word. Accents are yet another exception. Here's a simple example:. This search brings up several results on Los Angeles riots of It might seem strange for these results to populate from a search about , but it happens because some of the content includes the date even if the primary topic is over an event from a year later.

However, change the search slightly by adding quotes around all of it, and the results are way different. This search is now almost completely saturated with results about a movie called Los Angeles The reason for this is clear: the quotation marks demanded that all results include all three items in that order.

Searching for exact phrases is helpful, but there's a lot more you can do along with a quoted search to get even better results. Use quotation marks like you normally would, but then also add dates to limit the results to content that mentions those years only.

If you don't like the results you're seeing, use the minus sign to tell the search engine that you're specifically not interested in seeing those items in the results. This strategy works for words, dates, other phrases, and even entire domain names. Some search engines, such as Google, let you specify where to look for the phrase that you surrounded in quotation marks. For example, to show only the pages that include your items in the title:.

It also works for finding the phrase in the URL of the results:. One last interesting search combination that we'll discuss is using quotation marks to locate files. You can find all kinds of file types through Google , specifically. This example shows how to search for a phrase with quotation marks while also limiting all the results to PDF files only.

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Phrase searching works a little different in PubMed than in other databses; let us take a closer look: When you surround your search terms with quotation marks, you are telling the database that the words must appear as an exact phrase.

This "automatic term mapping" includes results that include the phrases " renal insufficiency " and " kidney failure ," as well as renal with the word insufficiency and kidney with the word failure.

We get fewer results with "kidney failure" because all the results contain the exact phrase. Using Phrase Searching Some tips for phrase searching in PubMed: When you search for a phrase in PubMed, it will not be mapped to more specific phrases.