Going Beyond Command Line Searching - Greg Notess

September 19th, 2005

Know Command Line Techniques AND Know what new content is available

+ Advanced features that the search engines offer
+ Unique Databases - Who is doing something different and has unique databases

+ Command Line Searches
- Truncation or Stemming or “Wild Card”
- Proximity

+ Truncation - everywhere except at Excelead with *
+ “Run” to “Running” is automatic in Excelead
+ instead of truncatiom, do
- OR words together
- synonym operator “tilda” operator
- Exelead - phonetic search or approximate searching
- Google - “Wild Card Word in Phrase” - (EG - Jean * Literary Award” or jean * * poetry)

+ Proximity is getting less reliable
+ Near at Exalead - 16 word proximity
+ GAPS at Google - uses wildcard word in phrase. 3 word proximity
+ Boolean - default to an AND search - most engines
+ OR is supported almnost everywhere
+ inurl - segments are separated by punctuation - Great example inurl:k12 blog for K-12 sites that mention blog.
+ Uses Google to find books that were published illegally on the web.
+ Unadvertised Yahoo demands (region:africa - lots more)
+ Remember to use Tabs to diversity
+ Greg - A9 is well worth a look - “OpenSearch” allows you to create your own personal database
+ Start thinking about book full-text searching

Search Subsets

+ The scope of the web serach engine matters
+ GigaBlast allows you to create search sub sites (limit to all ALR web sites)

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