PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE

Find Your Needle in the Haystack

...continued

Searching the Code

Many of the major search engines allow you to search within the HTML of a web page.

The title in a tag in the HTML that produces the words in the title bar in the very top of your browser window. For example, this page has an HTML title like this:

<title> 'Find Your Needle in the Haystack: Power Searching' from Quixotic Productions </title>

This page might be one of the listings if someone were to search for the following:

title: power searching

You can use your new combo skills with this feature as well:

title:"star wars" -reagan
title:"star wars" +"phantom menace"

Unfortunately, the title: command doesn't work at Lycos or Yahoo. At Lycos, you need to use the advanced search page to do a title search. At Yahoo, you must instead use the t: command instead of title: to search through title.

Another handy code search is the url: command. Using url: will search for all urls containing the keyword you specify. This is especially useful when you can't remember the exact url you are searching for, and can also be used to help you choose your own domain name. How many sites already have your keywords in their name? For example:

url:fluid

This will find any site that has these five letters in its domain name, including www.fluidcommunications.org

Note that Google uses site: rather than url:

Site Search
With the host: command, you can tell the search engine which websites should be excluded or included in your search. Let's run through an example. Imagine you wanted to see all the pages from SubmarineSailor.com.

host:submarinesailor.com

In response, the search engine would list all of the pages it has indexed from SubmarineSailor.com

Now imagine you wanted to find all the pages from SubmarineSailor.com that also mention the submarine Daniel Boone.

host:submarinesailor.com Daniel Boone

That tells the search engine to list pages with the words "Daniel" and "Boone" that are within the Submarine Sailor site.

You can pull out your combo skills and get more specific:

host:submarinesailor.com -"Daniel Boone"

Now we're telling the search engine to list all pages within Submarine Sailor that do not contain the exact phrase "Daniel Boone." In this case, all references to the Daniel Boone submarine would be excluded, but not any references to someone with the first name Daniel or the last name Boone.

Get Wild
You can search for plurals and variations of words using a wildcard. This is especially useful when you don't know the spelling of the word. The * symbol is used as the wildcard symbol. For example:

art* finds arts, artist, artistic, etc.
theat* finds theater and theatre.

Are You Ready?

Now that you're armed with a whole new arsenal of searching tools, get on out there and move around the net faster and more efficiently than ever before. And if you want to know even more advanced searching techniques...well, go out and find them yourself!

Page 1 • Page 2 • Page 3

Brought to you by: Amy Dent Beebe, Quixotic Productions- http://www.quixoticproductions.biz Visionary Design. Quixotic Productions provides web design and hosting services.

You may reprint this article on your web site, provided it is reproduced in its entirety along with this resource box. Copyright 2001-2004. All Rights Retained by Author.