NB: There are few main search engines without
crap paid results in the SERPS
Instructions & Caveats
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) using the main search engines.
Note that just because one, hundred, or thousand pages from a site are crawled and
made searchable trough one of the main search engines, this does not guarantee that
every page from an indexed site has really been crawled and indexed. This shortcoming
hits not only 'new' pages, that can take MONTHS to be indexed: beehives
of spiders harvesting
a site often MISS whole subdirectories, old and new. Useful material may
be all but invisible to those that only use 'main' search tools to seek.
Moreover anyone that uses regularly google (for instance, but other search engines are
not that different) will have noticed how DISTURBING commercial sites results nowadays
are. Would
a search engine have a "please eliminate all commercial sites form SERPS" (Search
Engines Result Pages) option, or switch, it would become king of the hill in a couple of months.
Anyway, when searching, you
would be
well advised to use regional engines, usenet and other specialized or targeted search tools, combing
techniques and your own bots as well, when searching your various targets.
Note that you can also easily search and find targets
that do not
exist any more :-)
Google, or Teoma or Fast?
That is the question. The only correct
answer is: "both... (troth?) and many more".
Go forth, explore the main search engines, and remember the differences:
One
Google to rule them all with broad might,
and americanocentric censorship,
one Teoma
to refine and refine and refine the queryes and find them,
one Fast for the obscure deep web,
to bring them all in the depth, and in the darkness bind them...
old seekers' lore, does not take into account good ole hotbot, btw.
ALTAVISTA ADVANCED
SEARCH
[Only 400 results viewable]
AND,OR,(),NOT,NEAR,",*
link:text
(search for links to 'text')
anchor:text
(search for links with the description 'text')
url:text
(search for given text in the url)
domain:targetdomain
(search files within 'targetdomain')
host:hostname
(search files on 'hostname')
title:text
(search 'text' inside the title tags)
applet:text
(search Java applets named 'text')
image:filename
(search images with such 'filename')
Read the Altavista
in depth page! Spammed as if there were no tomorrow &
very badly commercialized. The idiots behind altavista's marketing managed to
ruin the best search engine of the middle nineties. It is still THE ONLY
search engine which is TRULY BOOLEAN, hence offering truly amazing opportunities to real seekers...
once you have taken care yourself of the spam.
Altavista 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" (a seekers' proverb)...
experienced searchers mostly
jump directly in the middle of altavista's
results lists.
Altavista is the 'dead links
champion' among the 'main' search engines.
Use the Simple search (which defaults to OR) ONLY if you
really know what you are doing :-)
[GOOGLE]