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Review of iLOR - a Fabulous New Search Engine

© Paula Dragutsky

iLOR is an ingenious new search engine that makes searching easier, increases the usefulness of results, and therefore is ideal for research. In a word - iLOR is terrific!

What is truly novel about iLOR (which is short for Internet Lore) are the various ways it lets you manipulate the items that you retrieve. It's powered by Google but adds it's own software to Google's results and provides a simplified version of Google's excellent search interface.

iLOR was designed to work with Internet Explorer. Although it will work with Netscape Communicator and AOL's browser, some of its features may not be operational.

SEARCH TIPS

iLOR's General Search mode displays a search box plus menu options for searching entire web pages or web page titles only. You can use quotation marks to signify a phrase, the Boolean OR operator to prefer but not require a search word, and the minus sign to forbid a word. (It's not necessary to use the plus sign to require a word because iLOR's default requires every search word you enter to appear in all the items it retrieves.)

The Advanced Search mode is extremely simple and clear, and I would recommend using it. Just four search boxes are displayed corresponding to - ALL of the words, ANY of the words, this EXACT phrase, and NONE of the words - along with menu choices for searching entire web pages or web page titles. This layout is convenient for formulating searches. You can insert words in as many of the boxes as appropriate for your search.

iLOR displays the Advanced Search mode menu (which is compact) complete with your search words when it returns the search results. This helps you to see where you can make changes in order to make your search more precise.

For example, it's often troublesome to separate commercial sites from informational sites when searching for information about a particular subject.

Suppose you want to find information about the type of clothing worn during the Civil War. You might enter clothing in the ALL of the words box, pants shirts boots in the ANY of the words box; civil war in the this EXACT phrase box, and merchandise store in the NONE of these words box

When you get your results, you see that there are too many commercial sites. You might decide to further restrict your search by adding the terms order and catalog to the NONE of these words box. This refined search returns fewer web pages that are irrelevant.

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