Thursday, August 30, 2007

Extreme Internet Searching

In class last night I picked up a few quick searching tricks for using the following engines:

www.ask.com
www.exalead.com
www.google.com
www.yahoo.com
www.live.com


Plug these little puppies into your search box and you can perform very quick and effective advanced search of the internet:

* intitle:term searches for keywords anywhere in a title (ex: intitle:brady quinn browns)
* allintitle:term searches for pages that have all words in the title (ex: allintitle:three little birds)
* inurl:term searches for keywords in url only, useful for searching government websites. (ex: inurl:.gov)
* site:term limits search to one particular website (ex: site:cua.edu)
* filetype:term limits search to specific file types, useful if you're looking for, say, a powerpoint example on a topic. (ex: information literacy filetype:ppt)


Of course these major search engines all have advanced searching capabilities which walk you through these but this is much faster once you get the hang of it!