Search engines: how to use them, rules and commands |
| Alta Vista | Hotbot | Infoseek | Open Text | Metacraw. | Excite | Webcraw. | Lycos | Yahoo | |
| Anchor (1) | applet: domain: host: image: link: object: text: title: url: | Advanced search (2) | link: site: title: url: | Power Search | t: u: | ||||
| URL | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | ||||
| Domain/Site | yes | yes | yes | yes | |||||
| Geographic location | yes | yes | |||||||
| Media type | yes | yes | |||||||
| Images | yes | yes | |||||||
| Language | yes | ||||||||
| Proper name | yes | yes | yes | yes | |||||
| Date | Advanced | yes | |||||||
| Boolean operators | AND, OR, AND NOT, NEAR (10words) | AND, OR, BUT NOT, NEAR (80chars) | AND, OR | AND, OR, AND NOT | AND, OR | AND, OR | |||
| Boolean with parentheses | Advanced | yes | yes | yes | |||||
| Implied Boolean +/- (3) | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | |||
| Exact phrase (with double quotation) | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | ||||
| Case sensitivity | yes | yes | |||||||
| Truncation (4) | * | $ | * | ||||||
| Automatic trunc. | yes | yes | yes | ||||||
| Concept searching (5) | yes | yes | |||||||
| Duplicate results removed | yes | yes | |||||||
| Good relevancy ranking | yes | yes | yes | ||||||
| Fast search | Ultraseek | ||||||||
| Alternative search | Refine | ||||||||
| Results grouped by concept and/or type of site (6) | |||||||||
| Large database | yes | yes | yes | ||||||
| Usenet search (7) | yes | yes | |||||||
| Topic-based database (8) | |||||||||
| Small but evaluated subject directory (8) | |||||||||
| Large but unevaluated subject directory (9) | yes |
Footnotes:
(1) Anchor is somewhat inside of HTML pages which you can use for searching. Example: title:"Zen and the art of the Internet" or url:digital.com; Yahoo uses t: and u:, which mean title and url.
(2) You can't use anchors such as 'title:' or 'url:'. Hotbot has an advanced menu search for that.
(3) As you already know (see 'help' on WoW!) '+' means required and '-' means: don't search for this!
(4) You can use truncation, so, if you search for Int*, you wil find: International, Internet, internal, integer and so on.
(5) Some search engines like Excite try to 'understand' what you mean. They don't search for exact words which you typed. They understand your concept and search for item which match your query.
(6) Some search engines can do that; for example: Inference Find and MetaFind.
(7) Well, there are some specialized search engines...DejaNews is the most known.
(8) Such as Magellan.
(9) Great! If you are novice with search engines, Yahoo is for you!
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