First of all, what do we mean by "Searching with Quotes"?
Searching with quotes means putting quotation marks around some portion (or all) of the words that you type in a search box, like this:
Generally speaking, and if the search engine that you are using supports quotes, what will happen when you use quotes in your search phrase is that the search engine will only look for documents that contain an exact match to the phrase that you put in quotes.
Exact match:
Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President of the United States.
Not an Exact Match:
Benjamin Harrison states that all people must be united.
Another example: if you entered the search phrase "Star Spangled Banner", the search would return only pages with that exact phrase. Without the quotes, web pages would be found that have the words Star, Spangled, and Banner, but not necessarily in that sequence -- for example, without quotes, a page with the sentence "the astronauts put a spangled banner on the newly discovered star" might be returned.
Here are some rules to help you remember when to use quotes and when to leave them out.
- Use quotes
around proper names and words that go together in phrases. For example, you might use quotes around search phrases such as:
- Don't use quotes
around words that are general concepts or that wouldn't necessarily occur next to each other in a document. Additionally, you wouldn't need to put quotes around a single word in a phrase; that would be the same as putting just the phrase by itself! For example, you wouldn't want to use quotes in search phrases such as:
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