At 07:44 PM 3/17/02 -0500, Harold B. wrote the following: >Is it possible to search the Internet for a page just knowing some of >the text on that page? Are there any search engines that provide that >convenience?
Each search engine has a set of rules on how it works. For instance, AltaVista follows these: . When you type multiple words in the search box, AltaVista first looks for Web pages that contain all of the words. Pages with all those words will be at the top of your results; those with only one of the words will be at the bottom. . Enter words that you think will appear on the Web page you want. AltaVista indexes all of the words on each Web page. . To require a word, put a "+" directly in front of it. To exclude a word, put a "-" directly in front of it. (Example: +dogs -cats) . To search for an exact phrase, put it in quotes (Example: "to be or not to be"). . Uppercase and lowercase are treated the same. To maintain a certain capitalization, put the word in quotes. . Words with punctuation between them are treated as if they are surrounded in quotes. All punctuation marks are treated equally. Most search engines have an advanced section to "fine tune" your search requests. For example, Google advanced (http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en) allows you to force a search on a particular phrase. HotBot also allows forced phrase searching. See http://hotbot.lycos.com/text/?query= However, its best to know what search engines are good at what type of results. Looking for Hamlet is best at Hotbot, worst at AltaVista and mediocre at Google. To show how this works, let's try the phrase "to be or not to be" which most of us know as being in Shakespeare's Hamlet. If we use http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/text we don't find a reference to Hamlet in the first 10 results. Using advanced "exact phrase" http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/textadv doesn't find a reference to Hamlet either in the first 10 results. Using Google (http://www.google.com/) doesn't find Hamlet either. However, using advanced Google (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) with "exact phrase" at least finds a Shakespeare result as the second one. However, you will see that HotBot is the best at this search. Using http://hotbot.lycos.com/text/?query= and look for "exact phrase" find Hamlet: List of Scenes as the first result. -- Gerry Boyd ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
