HELP

Research Help

  1. Search Box
  2. About the Results
  3. Search Zoom
  4. Search Suggestions
  5. Search Results
  6. News Articles
  7. Sponsored Links
  8. Rate This Search
  9. Search Tips

1. Search Box (Back to Top)

The words you searched for appear here. You can:

  • add words
  • edit words
  • delete words
  • start over by deleting words and entering new words

Click the "Research" button when you are ready.

There are a number of tips for using our search box.

2. About the Results (Back to Top)

This line indicates how many web pages are relevant to the words for which you searched. It also indicates which of those pages are listed on this page. For example:

"1 to 10 of about 1,559,372 for televisions"

  • "1 to 10" indicates that this page is displaying the first ten pages that are relevant to the words for which you searched.
  • "1,559,372" is the estimated number of pages that are relevant to the words for which you searched.
  • "televisions" is the word for which you searched

3. Search Zoom (Back to Top)

Become's Search Zoom feature allows you to specify the type of results you would like the search engine to return. By default, it will show all types, and individual results will be labeled with a small icon if one of the four classifications applies. If you click on one of the Search Zoom buttons, we will only display results that match the classification you select. The classifications are:

  • Product Reviews. Product Reviews are critical evaluations of specific products, generally from an authoritative source such as a magazine, newspaper, or (some adjective connoting authority) website. Product Reviews may include reviews of one product or multiple-product "roundups."
  • Buying Guides. Buying Guides are general guides to a certain kind of product; for example, "How to choose the right DVD player," or "What to look for (and avoid) in a refrigerator."
  • Discussion Forums. Discussion Forums are sites where people from all over the web gather to discuss their own experiences with a product or service. They are a good place to find tips, tricks, and other kinds of under-the-radar advice.
  • Product Details. These are pages, often from manufacturers, that give specific details about products. If you need specifications on megapixels, weight, horsepower or screen size, this is where to look.

Click All Results to return to the default, mixed-classification view.

4. Search Suggestions (Back to Top)

As you type your search, the “Search Suggestions” section underneath the search box will dynamically update with suggestions based on our technology’s understanding of research-related content available on the web. Click on any of the suggestions to see Become’s results for that search term. Similar suggestions will appear at the bottom of the results page.

Note: For some search terms, it may not be possible to make suggestions—in these cases, the “Search Suggestions” section will not appear.

4. Search Results (Back to Top)

Become.com searches billions of web pages looking for product-related information. Our research results are created using our proprietary AIR™ technology, which blends expert editorial input into cutting edge machine learning technologies to provied you with excpetionally relevant web pages. Become does not accept payment for inclusion or placement of sites in its research results.

A closer look at each result.

For each web page that we find, we display a title, description and web address (url). The description includes excerpts from the page based on where the words for which you searched appear on that page. In both the title and the description, the words for which you searched are bold. The third line is the web address (url) for this page. Click on the title to view the page. Click on this icon Open page in new window icon to open the page in a new window.

The "Cache" link

Following the web address, is a "Cache" link. This is a link to a Become.com copy of this webpage. Our search engine technology crawls the web visiting shopping related websites. As part of this process, we save each page. If you cannot access a web page (the site appears broken, slow, or some other error), you can click on the "Cache" link to see what the page looked like when we visited it. The "Cache" link, however, only links to a copy of the content. The actual page may have changed since we last saw it.

Moving through the list of pages.

We display ten web pages at a time. You can move through this list by:

  • Clicking on the "Next" link to see the next ten pages.
  • Clicking on the "Previous" link to see the previous ten pages.
  • Clicking on the numbers to jump to different places on the list.

5. News Articles (Back to Top)

We sometimes display links to news articles directly below the search box. These links only appear in response to your search when we find an article of interest. For each news article that we find, we display the title of the article, the news source from which we located the article, and when the article was published. If we can’t identify when the article was published, we show you when we found the article.

We display a maximum of 3 links to news articles under the heading “In the News.” If more than 3 articles of interest are identified, a “More Headlines” link appears below the news headlines. You can click on the “More Headlines” links to locate up to 10 additional articles of interest.

6. Sponsored Links (Back to Top)

Sponsored links are provided by a third-party provider.

Note: In some cases, there are no relevant sponsored links. In these cases, this section will not appear.

7. Rate This Search (Back to Top)

At the bottom of each page, we give you the option to "Rate this search". We are doing everything we can to build the world's best shopping search engine, but we need your help. Once you rate a search, you will also be given the opportunity to provide additional feedback. We would love to hear from you.

8. Search Tips (Back to Top)

The following are some quick tips that might help you get to better web pages faster.

Specificity of words - digital camera vs. Canon digital camera

The more you tell us, the better we can help you. For example, if you want to buy a digital camera but have no idea what you want, just type digital camera like this:

This search will return buying guides, top ten lists, reviews and other information about digital cameras in general.

If you already know that you are only interested in Canon digital cameras then enter canon digital cameras like this:

This search will return reviews about canon digital cameras. It will exclude reviews and buying information that pertains to digital cameras made by other brands.

Searching for a phrase.

If you are searching for a phrase like remote control airplanes, try putting quotes around the phrase like this:

Putting quotation marks around your phrase will ensure that we only find pages that contain all three words next to each other.

Common Words

Many common words appear so frequently that it is impractical to use them to identify relevant web pages. In most cases, using common words does not improve the quality of web pages found, so by default we exclude common words such as "from", "the", "between" and so on. For example, if you search for:

We exclude "the" from the search and look for web pages that contain "winnie" and "pooh".

To prevent this exclusion, use phrase search or the plus operator (see below).

Excluding words from your search.

If you are searching for the latest Harry Potter book and do not want to see web pages about the Harry Potter video game, try:

The minus sign (-) will ensure that we exclude pages that contain the word or quoted phrase following it.

Similarly, if you want to ensure that a common word (see above) is included in the search, use a plus (+) sign before the word.

Limit your search to just one site.

You can limit your search to just one web site. If you wanted to search CNET for digital camera reviews, you could try:

To limit your search to a specific site, include "site:" followed by the web address (url) of the site you would like to search. This will limit the web pages that we display to just the web pages on that site.

Other things you should know.

  • In some cases, we will also search for synonyms of the words you entered.
  • Searches are case-insensitive. Searches for "harry potter" and "Harry Potter" will return the exact same web pages.

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