Search the web using AltaVista, search your own computer, search newsgroups and other tips. Search the InterNet
- Alta Vista: Advanced Query
is the search engine that works best for me. In it you can choose to search the web or the newsgroups.
You can indicate where you want to look for each of your words or phrases such as in the url: (address), host:, domain:, title:, text:, anchor:, applet: (Java), object: (ActiveX), link:, or image:.
There are separate options specifically for the Usenet: from:, subject:, newsgroups:, summary:, keywords:,
In order to make the most of any of the search engines you must take the time to learn and use the logical operators of the search engines that you use such as in AltaVista: the unary logical operator not (!), and the binary logical operators and (&), or (|), and near (~).
Help information for the Alta Vista Advanced Query, describes the features in the Advanced Query that will help you reduce the many undirected hits that you get using the default simple search.
Some Real Examples for Advanced Searches, is something I put together to provide some additional examples.
- AltaVista Personal Search
installs on your own computer (Windows 95/NT) enabling you to search your own computer files using the same advanced search arguments as you use on the AltaVista site. It searches MS Word, MS Excel, text, HTML files and others; and it is FREE. Download from the lower right corner of the AltaVista page (9MB download, expands to 34MB). Installation on a server is very expensive.Discovery is the replacement for AltaVista Personal Search and is available FREE from AltaVista look for Discovery on the main page. I have not been able to install it on my system because I run WinNT 4.0 and use dial-up AOL, which must be used as Win3.1. Nor could I get it to install on a new Win98 system when it came out, but it must work for most people. Like it's predecessor, it is probably expensive on a server.
- Yahoo Search
uses AltaVista for the search engine. Yahoo is a great big organized list of web sites with descriptions. No matter how well you can use the search engines, Yahoo remains as the top place to look for information that has already been categorized. Many hot lists point to Yahoo categories as well they should. Yahoo was designed sort of like your local library. If you don't know where the category is that you want you go to the index. I use Alta Vista to find the categories that I want in Yahoo by including url:yahoo.com in an advanced search on Alta Vista.- Netscape
has arranged several search engines on one page to help you find one or several search engines that work best for you. At the top of the screen choose Directory --> Search to find one you like the best. Every search engine has its following.- Google Usenet Advanced Newsgroups
is the search engine that works best for me when searching newsgroups.The old D.e.j.a options were a little different from AltaVista. The trickiest is perhaps were that and not is written as &! without any space between the two symbols. Parentheses are used with the logical operators. The symbol ^ can be used for near. ~a Author, ~s Subject, ~g Newsgroup, ~dc Creation date (~dc 1996/12/31). Since Google has take over the Boolean search arguments just described are not available, but they claim to be working on that and hopefully we will have the same or better (ala AltaVista) in the future.
The reason that I stopped using AltaVista newsgroup search was that AltaVista was not indexing all of the newsgroups that I was interested in.
~g ibm-news & conversion & ebcdic & ascii
~g microsoft.public.excel.misc & "formula of"
~g microsoft.public.excel.misc & "shift+enter"
~g microsoft.public.excel.misc & shift & enter (same as "shift+enter")
~g comp.os.ms-windows.apps.financial & Q98 & (accuracy | floating)
~g bit.listserv.ibm-main & ascii & conversion
~g comp.prog.rexx & ...
~g comp.prog.tsorexx & ...I have a web page with more specific information on Google Usenet Archives and Advanced Search (xlnews.htm).
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