Yandex is the major search engine of Russia and its focus is mostly on Russian websites. If you don’t speak, read, or write Russian, it may not be useful to you. However, it has a huge index and even native speakers of other languages can use its advanced search commands in order to find what they are looking for. There are many Yandex commands so I will divide this post into 2 parts. This is the part 1 of Yandex search commands cheat sheet.
| Command | Example | Explanation |
| keyw1 & keyw2 [& … ] | free & spanish & lessons | Stringing keywords using the “&” will cause the query to search for text with all words in the same sentence. This is useful for finding the exact page you are looking for given a sentence from it. |
| keyw1 && keyw2 [&& …]
keyw1 << keyw2 |
free && Spanish && lessons | This is like “&” except that you can search for the keywords in the same document. Note that “<<” also operates in the same manner. |
| “<keyword>” | “free Spanish lessons” | Search for keyword/phrase but do an exact match of text between the quotes. |
| keyw1 /+n Keyw2 | deliver /+3 grammaticallyNote: be certain to indicate a positive /n value with the + symbol. Otherwise, you will get mixed results. | Search for keywords but the keyword following the / must be offset in a forward direction by the number of words indicated. In the example, the search will find all documents with the word “grammatically” located 3 words after “deliver.” The benefit is that you can be very precise in finding the exact document you need given that you have the original text. |
| keyw1 /-n keyw2 | deliver /-3 grammatically | This is like the previous command except the minus sign tells the engine to search for the second keyword n words before the first. |
| keyw1 && /n Keyw2 | deliver && /3 grammatically | The “&&” specifies that the keyword and offset keyword must exist in the same sentence. The + symbol is not necessary in this case and tests showed that including it yielded mixed results. |
| keyw1 /(x y) keyw2 | deliver /(-2 +3) grammatically | This command finds the keywords within the word range specified by x (left offset of keyw2 from keyw1) and y (right offset of keyw2 from keyw1). |
| !keyword | !politic | The ! operator tells the search engine to find the keyword in strict form. In the example, all pages with the exact word “politic” will be found but not those with “politics” or “political.” |
| keyw1 ~~ keyw2 | Spanish ~~ tutorials | The ~~ operator specifies to exclude pages containing keyw2 from the search results |
| keyw1 ~ keyw2 | Spanish ~ tutorials | This operator is like the previous except it specifies that the exclusion occur when the keywords appear in the same sentence. |
| keyw1 | Keyw2 | Spanish (lessons | tutorials)“Spanish lessons” | “English lessons” | The pipe symbol is the OR operator. The example tells the search engine to look for the keyword Spanish and either lessons or tutorials. You can also use key phrases provided they are enclosed in quotes. |
| $ anchor(expression) | $ anchor(CNN) | This command searches for the expression within the anchor text of links. The anchor text is the text you see in a link to another website. |
To be continued…
