Operators
Photo: PixabayYou can use special operators to influence the results of your search on our websites. For example, you can exclude individual search terms or change their relevance.
Below you find a list of possible operators and how they work.
| Operator | How it works |
|---|---|
| + | A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each search result. |
| - | A leading minus sign indicates that a word must not be present in any search result. |
| < > | These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a webpage. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. |
| ( ) | Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested. |
| ~ | A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the webpage's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking so called noise words. A webpage containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether. |
| * | The asterisk serves as the truncation operator or wildcard. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. |
| " " | A phrase that is enclosed within double quote characters matches only pages that contain the phrase literally (as it was typed). |