Cisco.com Help

"+" Searches

Cisco.com Search ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters because they tend to slow down the search without improving the results. The search engine will indicate if a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page below the search box.

If a common word is essential to getting a particular result, include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)

Another method for doing this is to conduct a phrase search by putting quotation marks around 2 or more words. Common words in a phrase search are included in the search.

"-" Searches

Sometimes what you're searching for has more than one meaning. For example, the acronym "uBR" stands for "Universal Broadband Router," and "UBR" means "Unspecified Bit Rate." Since the search engine converts everything to lower case characters, the query "uBR" will return results for both definitions. However, words can be excluded from a search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term to avoid. (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.)

For example, to find pages about "UBR" that do not contain the word "broadband", type:

"OR" Searches

Cisco.com Search supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase OR between terms.

For example, to search for either a 7200 or 7400 VPN router, type:

Link Searches

The query link: shows all the backlinks for a given URL – that is, what pages point to that URL. For example, link:www.cisco.com will show all the pages that point to Cisco's home page. link: search cannot be combined with a regular keyword search.

Site Searches

The "site:" command allows users to constrain searches to a particular directory. Simply type the regular keyword phrase followed by a space, the "site:" command (without quotes), and the Cisco.com URL pattern. For example, to find all Cisco.com pages that contained the word "pix" within a particular directory, type:

pix site:www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030

The above query will return about 300 results that start with that URL pattern "www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030"

Be careful NOT to put a slash at the end of the URL pattern, otherwise, the search will return fewer or zero results. The same search for "pix" without the "site:" command will return many more results.