Yahoo! Search

  • Purpose: "Our mission is to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses." [1]
  • Audience: All Internet users.
  • Scope: The Internet. All documents that Yahoo's web crawling software can process.
  • Refresh Rate: Constant
  • Other Information: It is important to differentiate between Yahoo! Search, which this page is about, and the Yahoo web site directory. Yahoo! Search is a fully automated Internet search engine. (Although it seems to incorporate a few "Yahoo! Shortcuts," listed below, that may be human indexed.) On the other hand each web page in the web site directory is categorized by humans, it is not automated.

Boolean Operators edit

Boolean
Operator
Syntax Example
AND {Default} skunk tomato
OR OR skunk OR tomato
NOT - skunk -tomato

Other Operators edit

Syntax Example Description
"" "skunk smell removal" phrase search
+ skunk +and tomato include a common word that Google usually does not search

Search Fields edit

Yahoo! refers to the following as "Search Meta Words."


Syntax Example Description
site: site:wikibooks.org "how to search" searches web pages that have the specified domain
hostname: hostname:en.wikibooks.org "how to search" searches web pages that have the specified hostname
link: link:wikibooks.org searches web pages that link to the specified URL
url: url:http://www.wikibooks.org searches the Yahoo index for the specified URL; this should return either 0 or 1 results
inurl: inurl:wikibooks searches web pages that contain the specified text (wikibooks) somewhere in the URL
intitle: intitle:wikibooks searches web pages that have the specified word in the title

Search Shortcuts edit

Yahoo refers to the following as Yahoo! Shortcuts. Some have yet to be listed in this wikibook.

When typing a shortcut it looks just like a normal word search. The difference shows up when the search results appear. Below advertisements and above the numbered search results there will be an entry with a red Yahoo Y next to it. This shortcut entry may provide an answer, if using the calculator or dictionary, or it may link to further pages with the answer.


Shortcut Description Example Further Information
Calculator Allows calculations to be done from the search box. 45*12 45*12
Definitions Defines words define numeral define numeral

Other Features edit

Yahoo! Search also allows a number of searches which can only be done using templates on their web pages. These can be found in the advanced search. These include file format (doc, html, pdf, ppt, rss, txt, xls), search language, safesearch filter, and country.

Other features not directly impacting search results include number of results listed per page.