More searching tips

I went to another search tips seminar last week. This one was sponsored by the local SLA chapter, re-playing a Special Libraries Association webcast by Rita Vine of Working Faster from earlier in the year.

Here's what I didn't know already.

LINK: searching returns many more results in Yahoo! and MSN than Google. This is the search technique that shows what links to a particular url. So this search in Google finds 58 sites that link to my blog. The same search in Yahoo! finds 708 sites. I use LINK: searching more in web development than in research, but that's still a useful thing for many librarians to know.

When I do use LINK: searching, I always get many results of the site linking to itself. To eliminate that, use the '-' and site operators: link:www.mydomain.com -site:mydomain.com. This search in Yahoo! gets my results down to 434.

I knew about the inurl: field searching operator, but an idea how to make use of it popped in my head during the seminar. I'm sometimes frustrated searching on author's names because lots of bookstore results are listed before any official author's site that might exist. Since an author's name is often in the URL of the official site, a search of inurl:authorname might improve my results.

Google and Yahoo! both have the ability to search only sites with Creative Commons licensing. On Google's Advanced Search page, it's a drop-down box labeled Usage Rights. On Yahoo's Advanced Search page, it's a separate section with check boxes. The presenter didn't have much use for this feature. I would if the search engines would put it on the Advanced Search pages of their Image searches. Unfortunately, neither has yet. I like Creative Commons photos for throwing into a presentation or a web site.

I've used the FILETYPE: search to find PDF files. But apparently it works on many file types, even ones that aren't documented by the search engines. The presenter has had some good luck finding statistics using filetype:xls for Excel files. Since most people don't put the word "statistics" in their metadata about statistics, searching through Excel files is a more effective way to find them. Another tip, this feature has inconsistent syntax across the search engines. It's FILETYPE: in Google. It's ORIGINURLEXTENSION in Yahoo!

Nested Boolean searching is not available in Google. It is avalailable in Yahoo, Exalead, Gigablast, and MSN.

Exalead is the only major search engine that supports truncation--the * replaces one or more characters in the search term. Google and Exalead do automatic stemming of words--however, Google's page ranking algorithm trumps its stemming feature.     #

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