Using Search on Alcoa.com
To conduct a search on Alcoa.com, type in a few descriptive words or phrases that you
would associate with content on that topic. Then hit the "enter" key on your keyboard,
or click the "search" button for a list of relevant results.
The search will return a list of web pages and documents that match your query.
The list presents the most relevant results first.
Alcoa.com is utilizing Google as its search technology. The Google search
engine uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both
important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the
candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the
candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages in which your query terms
are near each other.
Automatic "and" Queries
By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms.
There is no need to include "and" between terms.
"OR" Searches
Google 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 an
office in either London or Paris, enter:
office london OR paris
Note: OR must be input in CAPITAL LETTERS! The English version of OR must be used.
See Your Search Terms in the Results
Every Google search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display
how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search
terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is
from a page you want to visit.
Does Capitalization Matter?
Google searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "new york city," "New York City," and "New York city" all return the same results.
Stemming or Wildcard Searches
To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support
"wildcard" searches. Rather, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter
into the search box.
For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline" or
"airlines". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline" and "airlines".
Refining Your Search
Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of the words in your query,
refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search
terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the
pages that were returned by your original broad query.
Excluding Words
You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in
front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus
sign.
For example, the search:
cans -recycle
will return pages about cans that do not contain the word "recycle".
Phrase Searches
You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes
("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using
quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.
Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes
because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search
words.
For example, the search:
tennessee-operations
is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double
quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as
phrase connectors.
