Help > Creating Search Terms

Search basics

The search terms field allows you to enter a number of words, phrases or series of characters to look for in an HTML page. The interpretation of the terms is designed to work in a very similar way to most popular web search engines. For example, if you entered:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Any page which contained ALL of the words above would be a match. The above has exactly the same meaning as:

The AND quick AND brown AND fox AND jumped AND over AND the AND lazy AND dog

Any page which is a match will be presented as having a potential problem by DeepTrawl. Details will be given as to which trawl type put this forward as a potential problem etc.


Using quotes

Using the previous method the words could appear separately anywhere on the page being trawled. To find a series of words (or any characters for that matter) in the precise order you write them, you can use double quotes. In the following example the page will only be a match if the words appear exactly as they are written in the query:

"the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

You may also use several sets of quotes if the page must include several pieces of text:

"the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" "Grammar lesson"


Using OR

You may use OR between words or sets of quotes. This will cause a match if either search term is present on the page. This is demonstrated in the example below:

food OR eat

You may use many ORs together so that only one of many alternatives is needed to create a match, as shown below:

food OR eat OR  culinary OR "recipe book"


Using NOT

NOT can be used to only match pages where a word, phrase or series of characters is not present, for example:

star wars NOT "Jar Jar Binks"

The hyphen character can also be used in place of NOT directly at the beginning of a word or quotes, for example:

star wars -"Jar Jar Binks"


Notes

  • Brackets () should not be used.
  • All words / strings of text outside of quotes must have spaces between them.
  • Case sensitivity applies both inside and outside of quotes, so when Case sensitive is left un-checked "HeLLo" is accepted when "hello" is entered as a search term.