Search Engine Reviews and Search Tips: Deja News and LookSmart

A good way to narrow your search (without having to learn any search syntax), is to use the Search Filter feature. Menus on the Search Filter page allow you to restrict your results to particular subjects, newsgroups, authors and date ranges. For example, if you enter cookies in the subject box, all your results will have cookies in the subject field. If you enter rec.food.* in the newsgroup box, Deja News will search for results only in newsgroups beginning with rec.food.

After you create your filter, Deja News will take you to the Filtered Search page. Let's suppose you enter "chocolate chip" in the search box. Using the filter created in the above paragraph, cookies would appear in the subject field of your results and chocolate chip would appear in the article (or in the subject field). All the messages would be posted to newsgroups with names beginning with rec.food.

Both the Filtered Search page and the Power Search page give you the menu option of requiring that either all your search terms appear in every result or that any of your search words appear in your results. The latter is the default mode of most search engines.

Searching Using Boolean Operators

In order to refine your search in the Filtered Search or Power Search modes, you have to use the Boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT (which I've discussed in previous articles).

Use ^ instead of NEAR - You can also use the NEAR operator, but instead of using the word NEAR, Deja News requires you to use the ^ sign (a policy probably created by a techie who was really bad at typing. Symbols exist for the other Boolean operators, but you can use the words instead). Entering hotels ^ chicago will give you articles with hotels within five characters of Chicago. The ^ operator won't work with phrases.

It's possible to increase or decrease the amount of characters that separate your search terms by adding the desired number of characters after the ^ sign. For example, entering hotel ^30 chicago will give you articles with hotels within 30 characters of Chicago.

Although additional search syntax are available in Deja News, you should be able to find the information you need using the search operators covered in this article.

LOOKSMART - A SMART PLACE TO GO FOR LEADING SITES

When you want to quickly find the leading sites about

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