Arthur Weiss Google vs other search tools

© AWARE 2013 Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

Arthur Weiss

,: [email protected] / Twitter: @awareci

www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

20 November 2013

Google versus the Rest Advanced Search Differences between

Google, Bing, Blekko & Other Search Tools

Online Information 2013


What is Search Engine “Advanced Search”

• An option to search for specific content going beyond the

standard search listings

Location of keywords e.g. in titles or the URL

File type for material e.g. mp3 or pdf files, or RSS feeds

Keywords in particular types of material e.g. blogs, discussions,

or describing images, etc.

Keywords from specified site, or geography

Keywords in proximity to other words and/or wildcard searches

Similar or related material

Sites that link to or from a web page / domain

Exclude certain types of material or key words

Limit search to a set of custom sites

Change relevancy e.g. date order, or weight search by a keyword,

etc.

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Does “Advanced Search” still exist

Advanced search is in retreat…

• Maintaining advance search capabilities has a cost for the search engines

• Only a small minority of searchers use advanced search options

• As “search” becomes more accurate for the average user, support for advanced search decreases further

Advanced search features have been disappearing for many years

• Altavista’s case sensitive and wild-card searches were never replicated by any other search engine

• Yahoo’s Linkdomain: disappeared 2 years ago….

3


Lost Search Functionality

“Yes, it's been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain….” Re: Google’s Synonym search ~ operator

“…we’ve had to remove certain features, such as Instant Previews. Instant previews saw very low usage by our users....” Re: Google Instant Previews

We “weren’t seeing enough usage of this filter to maintain it in the toolbar.” Re: Google’s “Related” search filter option

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Advanced Search – on its way out?

5

August 2000

August 2001

August 2002

August 2006

July 2011

September 2011


Advanced search is not easy to find

On the home page in

the “Settings” option at

the bottom of the page

OR in the cogwheel on

the right of search

result lists


Advanced search is not easy to find

Blekko “advanced search”: “We no

longer require users to be familiar with

our advanced search features to see

the benefits of slashtag categories….”

https://search.blekko.com/help


And no consistency…

• Cogwheel is the most common option for finding

Advanced Search on Google – but not consistent

Currently no advance search for news, books,

videos….

An inverted triangle in Google Scholar


So how do you do advanced search on Google

Slight differences

for Patents search,

Google Scholar,

etc.

Or search directly from the search bar using search operators

• Currently listed as supported: site:, link:, related:, * (wildcard), OR,

- (NOT), .. (Number range)

• Not listed (but work – and on advanced form): intitle:, filetype:, inurl:,

intext: and a few others.


Advanced Search – What’s Shared

Go

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Bin

g

Ble

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Du

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Du

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Baid

u

Yan

dex

Gig

ab

last

“quotes” ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

intitle ✔ ✔ ✘ ✔ ✔ title:() Title:

inurl ✔ ✘ ✘ ✘ ✔ ✔ ✔

Exact match intext inbody ✘ inbody ✘ +, ! +

site ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

filetype ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ mime: ✔

- (Exclude) ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ~ ✔

Boolean OR ✔ ✘ ✔ OR ✔ ✔

Date search ✔

Date

sort ✔

Date

sort ✘ ✔ ?

Related ✔ ✔? /similar ✘ ✘ ✘ ✘

Proximity * NEAR ✘ ✘ ✘ * , /+2 ✘

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Advanced Search – What’s Different

Google

Unique search options & filters (e.g. .. Numeric search)

Can search for specific material – blog posts,

academic, books, patents, etc. (with separate search

options & filters)

Bing

Search operators such as: Contains, feed, prefer, IP

Bing’s Academic search offers different features to

Google Scholar

Blekko

Focuses on eliminating “content farm” spam

Slash commands offer search categorisation options

(although now hard to find)

DuckDuckGo

Focuses on privacy & not tracking users

!Bang commands allow for quick searching on multiple

popular sites (e.g. “phil bradley” !amazon)

Available for TOR deep/dark web searches

(https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.to)

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Advanced Search – What’s Different

Baidu Best for Chinese pages. Also offers multiple other

options e.g. patent search, music, mail, social…

Yandex

Focus on Slavic languages plus English & French.

Extensive proximity options, plus filters for people,

traffic, news, etc. “Yandex Islands” gives one-stop data

Gigablast Open source search engine.

Sitelink: search operator finds links to a site

MillionShort Uses Bing API – eliminating top sites (based on Alexa)

from search

WolframAlpha “Knowledge Engine” allowing for specialist / niche

searching – with results in tabular format

Zanran Search for semi-structured tabular or graphical data

English language only

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Advanced Search Support Pages

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_operators&hl=en

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff808421.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795620.aspx

http://help.blekko.com/index.php/advanced-search-features/

https://dukgo.com/help/results/syntax

http://www.baidu.com/search/skill.html http://www.baiduguide.com/baidu-seo-guide/baidu-search-operators/

http://help.yandex.com/search/how-to-search/search-operators.xml

http://www.gigablast.com/help.html

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Arthur Weiss is the managing director of AWARE - a UK based

consultancy specialising in marketing & competitive intelligence analysis.

Contact Details:

Web Sites: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

E-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @awareci

Telephone: +44 20 8954 9121

Fax: +44 20 8954 2102

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Technology

Arthur Weiss Google vs other search tools