CSG's Internet Overture Search Engine

Enter your data for search in the form box above, then click the green button just to the right of it; detailed assistance and tips are provided below if you need them.

Search Tips

Overture is the former GoTo search engine. We feel that Overture.Com's search engine is pretty useful and very fast as it is. They indicate the technology for the engine is "search made simple". Even though simple should be that, we have a few tips to help you get even better results really easily.

How Overture searches if you just type in a search term

Unless you tell it otherwise, the Overture search engine tries to find sites that have all the search terms you specify, but when push comes to shove, it may return results for any of the words in your string of search terms. So if you search for "fly fishing" you may get some returns for information on fishing, even if the site doesn't say anything about fly fishing. This is because the engine found a result for the word "fishing" and it rates that result as better than no result at all.

So if you want to do more powerful searches, here are some tips:

Look for phrases (use quotation marks)

Okay, so let's say you are searching for fly fishing information only. The easy way is to just put the search terms in quotes, like so:

"fly fishing"

This forces the engine to only return pages that have the exact words "fly fishing". This result set is different from the result set if you do not use quotes.

Force words to appear (put a + in front of them)

To make sure Overture finds sites that contain certain words, regardless of whether they are in an exact phrase, put a plus sign (+) in front of the words you absolutely-positively-no-excuses want to show up. So, for example, suppose you have refined your fly fishing search needs and you are only interested in fly fishing in lakes (as opposed to rivers and streams):

Fly fishing + lakes

This search tells the engine to make sure to include the term lakes in any results that it brings up.

Exclude words (put a - in front of them)

Conversely, you can make Overture exclude sites with certain words by putting a minus sign (-) in front of them. So, suppose you want to fly fish on lakes, but only for fish other than bass. [What have you got against bass, anyway?] You could type

Fly fishing +lakes -bass

This tells the engine to exclude sites that have the word bass in the title or in the main description.

Increasing the strength of a word (Multiply it)

To juice-up the value of a word you're searching on you can put a number (with at least one digit before the decimal point, and at least one digit after), followed by the multiplication symbol (*) in front of the word you want to magnify. So, if you are really interested in locating lakes that feature fly fishing (as opposed to fly fishing on lakes), you could type something like this:

Fly fishing +2.0*lakes

This multiplies the strength of the word by the number you specify. In this case it's like searching for lakes lakes. And if you are that interested in the word, you'll probably want to tell GoTo that it is a required, so be sure to add a plus, as here:

+2.0*lakes

Use algebra

You can use parentheses, AND and OR (in capital letters) in Boolean algebraic fashion to process some parts of the search before other parts. So, suppose you want to find campgrounds or hotels that are near lakes on which you can fly fish. You could type:

(fly fishing) AND (campground OR hotel)

This tells the engine to look for fly fishing, then also look for either campgrounds or hotels.

... And in conclusion

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