Plus or Minus  Use the plus sign (+) to ensure that only web pages that contain the word you're searching for are displayed by your search engine. (A search engine is the page where you type in words or names that you want to find.) Use the minus sign (-) to ensure that web pages that contain a listed word are not displayed by your search engine. Examples: (1) go to http://www.altavista.com/ and type in "leonardo +horse" (but don't type in the quotation marks). After a few seconds, you should get a list of pages that have the word "leonardo", but only if they also have the word "horse" in them. (2) go to http://www.excite.com/ and type in "leonardo -horse" (don't type the quotes) and you should get a list of "leonardo" pages which excludes pages with the word "horse" in them. Note that there is a space between "leonardo" and the plus (+) or minus (-) sign but no space between the signs and "horse." That's because the sign must be attached to the beginning of the word to work. The minus sign is especially useful if you search and get a huge list of web sites you don't want to see. Example: If you're looking for da Vinci and get a zillion pages of di Caprio, type in "leonardo +vinci -caprio" (no quotes) and you will get pages about the artist/inventor and none about the heart-throb.

Bonus tip: note also that both "leonardo " and "horse" are in lower case. If you use any upper case (capital) letter, the search engine will only find words with the same upper case letter. "Leonardo" will find "Leonardo" (capital L) but not "leonardo" (small l). If you use all lower case letters, "leonardo" will find both "Leonardo" and "leonardo", as well as lEonardo, leONardo, etc.