Webtop enter the s.e. race! Google swallows Deja! Google searches PDF files! Googled
anonymous Topclick! Altavista drops Usenet! Excite new "precision" engine!
Google moves to Linux!
Try Raging: Altavista's
answer to Google's success
Just copy this page onto your harddisk as
c:\main.htm (or whatever), and then
use it (after having edited anything you fancy)
in order to perform EFFECTIVE searches on the web
(and elsewhere).
ALTAVISTA ADVANCED
SEARCH AND,OR,(),NOT,NEAR,",*
Read the [Altavista
in depth] page!
Altavista's algos
main drawback is that they are very easy to spam, so you'll get most useless results in the
first 20-30
positions: "hic alta, hic salta"...
experienced searchers mostly
jump directly in the middle of altavista's
results lists. How many results? Seems to depend on the hour of your query / servers' workload and if
you ask the first (less 'results' reported) or the last of the 100*10 results pages (more 'results' reported)
Use the Simple search (which defaults to OR) ONLY if you
really know what you are doing :-)
ALTAVISTA
SIMPLE SEARCH Only 1000 results viewable!
Read the [Altavista in depth] page!
Altavista's algos
main drawback is that they are very easy to spam, so you'll get most useless results in the
first 20-30
positions: "hic alta, hic salta"...
experienced searchers mostly
jump directly in the middle of altavista's
results lists.
No boolean! It defaults to OR... hence very useful for quick searchprobes! For
boolean operators use Advanced Altavista instead!
RAGING Only 1000 results viewable! The quickest tool on the web. Text-only version, of course! ~
Read [Some oddities @ Raging]
EXCITE
AND,OR,(),NOT,,", Tries to guess and figure out what you really want: a mixed
blessing New "precision" search since June 2000 (see below). An interesting
Excite-specific algo is that shorter urls rank much higher, which is not so stupid after all.
Unfortunately, since
they evidently rank for money, they did manage to ruin this once interesting search engine :-(
Google +,,(),-,,",
Read the [Google in depth]
& the [Google moves to Linux] pages
Google searches inside PDF files! Moreover, it locates
the text most relevant to your specific query and highlights
your keywords
and its context! Very quick and very accurate because of its algos, it is very
useful for all stalking purposes
because of it CACHED pages! Remember that in google it does not hurt to put
a + before every queryword :-)
Since most other search engines are just keen on making money no matter how, Google
represents a breath of fresh air, and (mostly) holds the promise of delivering
high relevancy results without all the extraneous and often ridicolous and
annoying 'services' of the
larger portals. Google is expanding quickly and had now swallowed Deja's huge usenet
database as well.
Topclick (the 'anonymous' google)
Sort of overstructure to google, they
promise [privacy]
in various [forms],
of course you may or may not believe them... "TopClick does not
use cookies or other profiling technologies, display banner advertising,
or disclose any personal information about our customers to third parties", which alas seems to
imply that they, even without 'profiling technologies' do gather after all
"customers" (and information about them) for their internal use... but one thing is
sure: since not everybody is capable of learning the relevant
techniques on his own
there's a big
'market for anonymity' on the web and we'll see more and more services on these lines... good!
"Part Man, Part Machine" ~ Open Directory & Wise wire systems organize
results: avoid "Web Pages" (spammed) and use
"Categories" and "Web Sites" results instead.
Over 200 million files have been catalogued by Lycos, now managing the famous Trondheim engine,
and can be searched using either the lycos_ftp normal form or the
lycos_ftp advanced form (the one below). Do not underestimate the amazing
power of this tool for searching purposes! A true searchmachine!
GO.COM (powered by Infoseek) " Infoseek was the "Proximity champion", Expert ~S~eekers always
used Infoseek for proximity queries. Note the
"Search within results" option. Unfortunately Infoseek has been transfromed into GO.COM and
the proxility commands does not seem to work anymore. Also: GO.COM offers an
automated translation
service
à la Altavista. GO.COM servers are often overloaded :-(
A list of Infoseek's old beautiful proximity operators :-( ADJ, ADJ/#, OADJ, OADJ/#, NEAR NEAR/#, ONEAR, ONEAR/# FAR , FAR/#, OFAR, OFAR/#,
Spider: Sidewinder. Does not go trolling for unsubmitted pages, doesn't crawl inside sites,
just indexes (very slowly) individual submissions. Answers display either metadescription or first 200 chars.
Spider IPs are around 204.162.96.xx
Recently bought by Lycos. Uses the Inktomi indexing services, but
ranks results using "Direct Hit" algos data and it's own internal data.
Its 'popularity' result engine is a mixed bless ("clicking" algo: the more people click on your
site the more it weights). Moreover it seems to give a lot of weight to older pages.
Note the "Search within these results" option! Try the advanced options:
[Hotbot BETA supersearch form]
Indexing service:
Inktomi.
Spider: Slurp.
Apart from Hotbot, Aol, Snap and MSN, Inktomi serves also private databases with its spider.
Example string: http://www.webtop.com/search/vanilla/results.htm?WEBSITE_SEARCH=1&QUERY=fravia&EXPANDED=web&Search.x=40&Search.y=10
helppowersearch
European search engine developed at Cambridge uni. Runs on Linux (of course :-). Probability and Baysian inference applied to
the search process. No booleans. Instead of the traditional
method of searching for a matched keyword in a document,
the probabilistic techniques focus on the relative value
of a word - either in the search expression, or in the document
being indexed.
