Unusual power Web searching commands.(on the net)

Publication: Online

Publication Date: 01-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Information Today, Inc.

Web searching has changed the nature of online. What online searcher, even a decade ago, would have thought that hundreds of millions of online searches would be sent each day? Who is an online searcher these days? It can be almost anyone: parents, children, plumbers, waiters. The new style of online searching, at least as defined by the majority of Web searchers, is to put a few query words into Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. With the quantity of information resources on the Web these days and the ease of finding certain kinds of popular information, this simple technique is often effective.

If you are a searcher who prefers this new style of online searching, and you are always happy with the results, read no further. This column takes a look at some of the more esoteric and unusual of the advanced search commands from the search engines. These are tools that you may never use or may only try once in a year of searching. But for those who like to dig deeper, who seek the hard-to-find information nuggets, using these commands can help you mine the Internet for information in ways that others will never consider.

FEATURE CHURN

Some of these more unusual features come and go at a rather rapid rate. And with Yahoo!'s impending acquisition of Overture, which now owns both AlltheWeb and AltaVista (remember Yahoo! already owns Inktomi), some of these commands could disappear as well. Overture has already said that it plans to merge the underlying database from AlltheWeb an d AltaVista, relying on the AlltheWeb technology for crawling and indexing the Web and on AltaVista for the search interface. How that may change those search engines remains to be seen.

The merger may cause the disappearance of some search options by the time or soon after this is published. So use the advanced features while you can. Search engines certainly look at their usage logs. The percentage of searches that use any of these commands is quite small. Using them once in awhile can help let the search engines know that these command options are still...

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