Truncation is a search technique that refers to the ability to search for a part of a word. A symbol such as the asterisk (*) is used to represent the rest of the term. End truncation is where several letters at the beginning of a word are given but the end can very. In internal truncation, * can represent character within a word.

Stemming related to truncation is to find grammatical variations of a word such as its plurals, singular forms, tenses, etc. End truncation example: photo* finds photograph, photography, photographer. Internal truncation example: wha*ver may find whatever, whatsoever. Stemming: bake may find baked, baking, baker.

Cast sensitive: most search engines are not case sensitive about the keyword(s) you may enter and treat upper case, lower case, and mixed case all the same. However, certain search engines have the capability to much exact case. Entering a search terms in lower case will usually find all case. In a case sensitive search engines, entering any upper case letter in a search term will invoke the exact case match.

Fields searching allow you to designate where a specific search term should appear, i.e., instead of searching for words anywhere on a web page, you specify parts of a document like the title, the URL, an image tag, or a hypertext link on a web page. The fields are usually given in a drop-down menu to choose from.