The answers should be much more on target than with simple addition. Once you've mastered adding, subtracting and multiplying, you can combine symbols to easily create targeted searches. Practically all of the major search engines support Search Engine Math, and these are listed on the Search Features Chart . See the Search Assistance Features page for more information about phrase searching at AltaVista and Google. Snap, Lycos, MSN Search, Netscape Search and Yahoo are unusual in that they are primarily directories, which are built by humans.
Editors list sites by category, and they usually give each site a short description.
This means that when you search at a directory, you are first shown matching web sites . After that, or if there are no matching web sites at all, you are then shown matching web pages that come from search engine listings. The Major Search Engines page explains this in more detail. You can still use Search Engine Math at directories, despite them being slightly different from search engines that crawl the web. The above tips are probably enough for the 90 percent of search engine users out there.