AltaVista - Yahoo - Lycos - Excite - Infoseek

See the Help Area for tips on using the Miniportal's Java Script Internet Search.


Metacrawler


Metacrawler searches at one time, several databases created by other search services. Instead of separately searching, for example, Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista, etc., Metacrawler will search them all at once and present you with one unified list of results.


Phrase searching: use quotes

Omit common words

Boolean operators: AND finds pages that include both terms, OR finds pages that include either term or both, NOT finds pages that include the first term but not the second - e.g. science NOT fiction, NEAR finds pages in which both terms appear within x words of each other in either direction. If no range is specified, the search will return pages in which the two terms are next to each other (in either order). ADJ finds pages in which the two terms appear next to each other in specified order.

Index: Index may be changed using one of the 4 choice boxes above the search box: Directory, Audio/MP3, Newsgroups, Shopping.

Titles or Summaries - view results in either a short or detailed format. Short format lists titles of Web resources. Detailed format provides titles plus summaries, URLs, numerical relevancy scores, and the option of viewing similar pages for each result returned.

Number of Results per page - choose to view search results 10, 20 or 30 at a time from the power search area.

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Alta Vista


Plus and Minus: Precede a required word or phrase with + and a prohibited one with -.

Phrase searching: use quotes. Punctuation in the search string also forces words into a phrase, just as quotes do. (Punctuation is treated as white space.)

Case sensitivity: a lower case search string will pull up upper case matches. The reverse is not true--upper case search strings produce only exact matches. (This also appplies to accents.)

Wildcards/truncation: * can be used after at least three letters. The *-notation will match from zero up to five additional letters in lower-case only. Capital letters and digits will not therefore be matched. AltaVista will match words lexically unrelated to your query word. (sing* will find singe, single, singular, as well as singing, singers, etc.)

Fieldnames:It is possible to restrict searches to certain portions of documents by preceeding the search terms with the fieldname to search in lower-case, followed by a colon (e.g. title:"The Wall Street Journal") Fields to search include: title: anchor: text: applet: object: link: image: url: host: domain:

in Usenet news articles: from: subject: newsgroups: summary: keywords:


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Yahoo


Phrase searching: use quotes

Plus and Minus: Precede a required word with + and a prohibited one with -.

Truncation/Wildcard: attaching a * to the right-hand side of a word will return left side partial matches.

Field searching: t: - will restrict searches to document titles only; u: - will restrict searches to document URLs only

Combined searches: combine any of the query syntax as long as the syntax is combined in the proper order: +, -, t:, u:, "" and lastly *.


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Lycos


Lycos advises against searching for numbers and symbols

The minus (-) symbol creates a "not" search.

Lexically relevant truncation is implied; a period (.) after a keyword forces an exact match.

A dollar sign ($) can be used to enter a word fragment and get hits which may not be lexically relevant (sing$ gets singers, singular, singleterry).


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Excite


If one result is a very good match for your search, click on the "More Like This" link next to the title. That document will then be used as an example in a new search to find sites even more closely matching that one. (Remember though this is still based on ICE--what you thought was relevant about the site is not always what ICE thinks is relevant.)

Phrase searching: use quotes.

Proper Nouns: Excite recognizes proper nouns, so if John and Wayne are capitalized, documents that contain those two words next to each other, (as if you had put them in quotes) will be retrieved.

Plus and Minus: Precede a required word or phrase with + and a prohibited one with -. Pluses and Minuses can be combined in one string.

Boolean operators turn off the concept-based search mechanism (ICE),enabling exact word searches. Boolean operators include AND, AND NOT, OR, and parentheses. The operators must appear in ALL CAPS and with a space on each side.

Display Excite lists 10 results at a time in decreasing order of relevance, (see percentage sign to the left of each result). Many pages with the same basic URL may have similar relevance, so one screen of results may all point to a single site. By clicking the "Sort by Site" button at the top of the search results page, the list can be compressed to show a listing by URL.


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Infoseek


In the search box, type a few words, a Proper Name, or a full question.

Proper nouns: Capitalize; use a comma to separate lists of names.

Phrase searching: use quotes or hyphenate the phrase.

Plus and Minus: Precede a required word or phrase with + and a prohibited one with -. Pluses and Minuses can be combined in one string.

Use a pipe ( | ) to search a certain set of results only. This narrows search results by searching for one word, and then within that set of results, for another.

Field searching: Restrict searches to certain portions of Web documents by using field syntax. Field name (link, site, url or title) should be in lower case, immediately followed by a colon, with no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.


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