Help Topics

• Formulating a Request
• Searching
• Prohibiting a Word or Phrase from Search Results
• Prohibiting a Website from Search Results
• Conducting a Verbatim Search
• Searching a Single Website
• Opening Best Match
• For web masters: Prohibiting Cole8Spider from crawling your site

Help Details

Formulating a Request

• Make the request as short as possible. For instance while searching for a marketing job, instead of list of marketing jobs available in nigeria, a better request would simply be marketing jobs.
• Cole8 is not case-sensitive. i.e. searching for either POTATO CHIPS, PoTatO ChIpS or potato chips will yield the same result.
• Punctuation are treated as spaces; i.e. Cole8 searches for table-tennis as though it were table tennis.

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Searching

Simply type your request (i.e the name or short description of the desired resource) into the search box and then click Search Nigeria. In response, Cole8 will provide a list of matching results from Nigeria, arranged according to their computed order of relevance.
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Prohibiting a Word or Phrase from Search Results

You can prohibit as many words as you like from search results by preceding each of them with a minus sign, e.g. searching for bank -microfinance will find pages containing the word bank but not the word microfinance. If its a phrase that you wish to prohibit, wrap the phrase in double quotes preceding it with a minus sign, e.g. countries -"United States of America"
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Prohibiting a Website from Search Results

You can prohibit as many websites as you like from search results by preceding each of them with a minus sign, e.g. searching for jobs -site:www.cole8.com -site:www.google.com.ng will find pages containing the word jobs without including results from both www.cole8.com and www.google.com.ng.
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Conducting a Verbatim Search

Use quotes around terms that should be found exactly as typed, e.g. 'Things Fall Apart'.
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Searching a Single Website

To search a single website, formulate the request thus: [query][space]site:[website] e.g. to search for dogs on say www.nairaland.com, simply type dogs site:www.nairaland.com and then click Search Nigeria. All results will be from www.nairaland.com only.
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Opening Best Match

To open the web page from Nigeria that best matches a given term, simply type the term that identifies the page (or site), and then click Best Match. Cole8 will make a best effort to automatically redirect your browser to the desired web page (or site); e.g. typing Etisalat and then clicking Best Match will automatically open the website of Etisalat. If the term is not sufficiently unique, Cole8 makes a best guess and opens the resulting page.
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For web masters: Prohibiting Cole8Spider from crawling your site

Cole8Spider honours all robot exclusion rules that apply to it. If you wish to prohibit Cole8Spider from crawling your site, simply place the following in your web server's robots.txt file:
User-agent: Cole8Spider
Disallow: /

Or to prohibit all robots including Cole8Spider, add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To achieve the latter without editing the robots.txt file, add the following meta tag to your page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

When Cole8Spider sees any of the above, it will not proceed any further with your site.

For more information about robots exclusion, you can visit
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt or
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html.