Basic Search

To enter a query into SearchCactus, just type in a few descriptive words and hit the 'enter' for your list of relevant results.

SearchCactus only searches for pages that exactly match your search terms, so you can try using different versions of your search terms. For example, if a search for "Boston hotel" didn't turn up what you were looking for, try "Boston hotels" instead.

Or you might try rephrasing your query. For example, searches on "cheap plane tickets" and "cheap airline tickets" return different sets of results.

Phrase Searches

With SearchCactus, you can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") will appear together in all returned documents (unless they are stop words, special common words that require a "+" sign -- see below). Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. SearchCactus recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes; for example, mother-in-law is treated as a phrase even if the three words aren't in quotes.

Stop Words

SearchCactus ignores common words and characters, known as stop words. SearchCactus automatically disregards such terms as "http" and "com," as well as certain single digits and single letters, because these terms rarely help narrow a search, and can slow down searching significantly.

Use the "+" sign to include stop words in your search. Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign. You can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.

Excluding words from your search

Sometimes it is helpful to choose certain words or phrases to exclude from a search; you want all relevant results except those containing a certain word or phrase. SearchCactus supports this "not" functionality with the minus sign ("-"). Use the minus sign to purposefully exclude a term from your search. Be sure to include a space before the minus sign and SearchCactus will ignore all pages containing that word.