Yahoo has a post on its blog about ways to do advanced searching. I didn’t know about a couple of these tips, while some others are good to be reminded of.

I did not know about the square brackets search. If you search on Yahoo and enclose your search words in square brackets (like [three mice]) your search will only find the words in that order. In this example, you’ll find “three blind mice” but not “mice of three”. I had trouble finding examples where this worked well; I finally found that [pepper dr] got about 1/3 the results of dr pepper. Even searches like [Ricardo Lucy] found only slightly less results than Lucy Ricardo. You’ll have to do some experimenting to see where this search works best.

You might remember that Yahoo does have a syntax for searching by filetype. It’s extremely awkward, but it is a syntax. To search by filetype, search use originurlextension: before the name of the syntax. For example, try originurlextension:hamburger or originurlextension:tab. (The extension, as you can see, does not necessarily have to be a standard extension.)

And, of course, Yahoo defaults to AND — that is, it’ll search for all the terms you specify. You can choose between terms to find instead by using OR in your search — stuffing OR potatoes for example. Check out all the shortcuts on the blogpost. You’ll learn, or at least remember, a thing or two.