April 2004 Archive

New Bookmarklets Page

Now that I use bookmarklets more and more for quick access to the search engines, I decided to share some of my favorite, and most frequently used ones. The new bookmarklets page includes very basic information about bookmarklets along with a few varieties specific to search engines. The Transfer Search ones, especially, make it extremely quick to compare results from different search engines.

Gigablast Defaults to AND

Sometime recently, Gigablast finally made the switch to a default AND operation, joining the default function of all the major search engines. Entering more than one word will automatically search for all the query terms. Gigablast review and the search engine features chart have been updated.

Advanced Yahoo! News Syntax

Gary Price notes that the following advanced search commands can be used:

• headline: Search only in news headline or title of article. Example: headline:diplomacy
• source: Limit to a specific news source only. Example: source:"seattle times" government
• site: Limit to a specific domain or top level domain. Examples: site:bbc.co.uk blair or site:uk blair
• url: Specify a particular portion of a URL between periods. Example: url:gazette police
• location: Limits to a specific location (country, state, or city). Example: location:nevada rodeo

Also, Gary has been "told that using * as a wildcard and the author: limit will be available again in the near future."

Google Announces Email

Must be nice to be rich. Google figures it can afford to offer free email along with 1 GB of storage for each users with all of it financed by context sensitive text ads. Just what I want. I can read my spam and see ads for more. However, at this point, GMail is not open to everyone and is by invitation only.

Lycos Switches to Inktomi

There is no more AlltheWeb (or FAST Web Search if you prefer) database access anywhere that I know of. Lycos is now shows an Inktomi logo and uses the same Inktomi-based database as is seen at AltaVista and AlltheWeb. And that database appears to be but a subset of the version available at Yahoo! itself, which usually finds more results on the searches I tried. For certain popular queries, Lycos will give the first ten or so results from the LookSmart directory.