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Selected Search Tools for the WWW: A Guide

HotBot

Click in the box next to the Search Smarter label and type in your search terms. You can choose to search all the words, any of the words, exact phrase, the page title, the person, links to this URL, or Boolean phrase using the pull-down menus to the left and below the search term box.

All the Words is the equivalent of the Boolean and search; Any of the Words is the Boolean or. Exact phrase searches can be specified using the pull-down, or you can type the phrase in double quotation marks (e.g. "ice cream") when using any of the other pull-down options. The search for the person is an adjacency search, not just a search for names. It will search for two terms you enter in any order but next to each other only. When you use the Boolean phrase option, you can use the operators and, or, or not and nest search terms and commands using parentheses ().

Queries can also be modified using the plus sign + or the minus sign - to require or exclude words, and can be targeted to search domains, titles, links, and other parts of web pages. See the Help for more details.

You can select a range of publication dates to search (anytime, last week, last two weeks and so on), select sites by language, look for pages that include certain kinds of media, and specify the format for display of your results using the additional check-off and pull-down menus. When you've entered all the information, click on the Search button.

Click on the button labeled Advanced Search to construct even more complicated searches. You can specify dates of publication, country of origin, media type, page depth, and a greater number of search terms, allowing for more detailed search structure. Once again, look at the Help for more details.

HotBot supports truncation and wildcards. The asterisk * is used to match no characters, any character, or any characters at the end or beginning of a word. The question mark ? matches any individual character. HotBot searches are case sensitive when you use capital letters.

Click here to search HotBot
Summary Chart
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Created: 9 February 2000
Revised: 11 April 2001
Content verified: 9 August 2002

Gretchen Revie, Reference Librarian, Seeley G. Mudd Library
Lawrence University, PO Box 599, Appleton, WI 54912 (920) 832-7000