Advanced
Filters - title search
by
Paul Myers, BBC Training & Development
The title of a webpage appears as the clickable wording on a search engine suggestion. For example, Google will give this as its first "hit" when you search for "Tony Blair" Iraq Belgium:
Buzzle.com - web Portal
...anti-war, when the chairman announced: 'Most of us here wish Tony Blair was our ... Belgium. ... It is impossible not to notice the children as you travel around Iraq. ...
buzzle.com/index.asp - 46k - Cached - Similar pages
In this suggestion, "Buzzle.com - web Portal" is the title. If we go into Buzzle, we find that it is a daily news portal. Sure, on the day Google indexed it, Buzzle may have had content incorporating the keywords "Tony Blair", Iraq and Belgium, but since then the content has changed.
Our eyes naturally drift to other suggestions on the same page. With titles like "Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Belgium warns Blair" and "Belgium Criticized Britain for Lack of EU Policy on Iraq". These seem like much more suitable links for us to follow.
Fortunately, you can limit your search to such pages by specifying the keywords that should appear in a title. To some extent, this lets you hone in on pages of a certain subject and emphasis.
Title Search Examples
Search engines have differing capabilities and syntax. For example, Google's "allintitle:" command will allow you to search for pages with a string of keywords, whereas Altavista "title:" and "-title:" commands allow you to include some words from a title search, but exclude others.
blair intitle:belgium
gives you pages with with "Belgium" in the title and "Blair" anywhere on the page.
allintitle:belgium blair
gives you pages that have both "Belgium" and "Blair" in the title
Altavista
title:blair belgium
gives you pages with "Blair" in the title and "Belgium" anywhere on the page
blair title:belgium -title:blair
is the same but excludes pages with "blair" in the title.