IL2006: Improve your Search

Advanced Search – Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown

If you think you know how to search, go to the Features chart and check out some of the cool things you can do with search engines. One feature is link checking. It doesn't work that well on Google.

Link Searching
-who is linking to whom – you can use this search to evaluate your website
-Link: http://ibm.com
-This works well @ Yahoo
-Link:http://loc.gov NOT site:loc.gov to eliminate internal linking
-On Live use a slightly different syntax: linkfromdomain: loc.gov and site: hr – tells you what Croatian websites are linked to from the Library of Congress

Also, phrase searching is out. Exalead now has proximity searching. YAY!

If you put NEAR between two words in Exalead, you get those two words within 16 words of each other. Not Lexis or Westlaw, but still really useful for more precise searching. This works well; it gives you a new view of web search results.

If you put NEAR/5 between two words, you those two words within a 5 word proximity
-Google has less precision in this area : “teddy * bear”