Field Searching

What is Field Searching?

• Electronic records, like print records, are organized into separate fields. A typical web page is composed of the following major fields: title, host (or site), domain, URL, and link. When information is entered into a record's field, some search engines allow you to retrieve it by using the correct field label in combination with you search term(s). Where available, field searching on the web is a very powerful tool. It allows you to specify exactly where you want the search engine to look in the web document.

Title Searching

• The title appears in the banner at the top of the browser's window. Searching for a keyword in the title field, rather that as a keyword alone, will likely produce more relevant responses.
• Example: title:"lung function" returns pages that have these words in the title.

Domain Searching

• Information from a particular kind of site can be limited by only searching one of the current top level domains:
  

  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 biochemistry AND antibodies limits search to educational sites dealing with biochemisty of antibodies.

Link Searching

• If you have a web page & 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:http://www.visembryo.com