This tip was printed from the MalekTips Computer and Technology Help and Tips website at http://malektips.com.

MSN Search - Ignore Words in Query

SUMMARY: Perform more powerful queries with MSN Search by filtering results containing certain unwanted keywords.

When performing searches with MSN Search involving words that have multiple meanings, you might wish to prevent the results from including webpages matching the word's alternate meaning. There are also times where searching for a keyword or phrase brings up webpages involving the word's most popular use, but not what you need at a particular time.

For example, if you want to search for information about sweet potatoes (nutrition information, how to grow them, etc), but you don't care about recipes using the vegetable, you might perform a search for:

sweet potato

However, many of the results deal with recipes. To ignore results with the word "recipes", just prefix it with a minus sign, i.e.:

sweet potato -recipes

You may also want to ignore the singular form of the word:

sweet potato -recipes -recipe