Tips on Google Advanced Groups Search and Altavista Advanced Search

Dear Philip,

Thanks for the three replies - I know your Altavista post is quite
ancient - 1999 or something (I snipped out the header) and much has
changed since then.

Part-loyalty to Altavista means I always go there first, I started
using it from shortly after the press-release announcing it used
innovative techniques to crawl the web - that was years ago.

However, I have not really had much joy with other engines, I tried
meta-searchers, and for a while Northern Light, but have found that
Altavista's command set is closest to what I need. I have tried Google
as several people recommend it at work, however it seems to throw so
much dust in the air that I get sore eyes.

You can go beyond the "simple" Google interface by using things
like minus characters for phrases you want to not see in the

So how do you do that, -"exclusion phrase"
and then this will not reject "Exclusion phrase" or "exclusion-phrase"
will it?

Google does the same thing. They also will provide a HTML equivalent
to most PDF documents for those who either don't have a PDF reader
or who prefer to view a document as HTML. Obviously all of these
things mean that at some point, Google had to decode and/or archive
all of this information - and store a pretty significant portion of
it on Google's own servers.

Not quite - I am talking about actual URLs to a PDF file, but from
what you say it appears the engine server needs to have the content in
ascii form to be searchable. I have never noticed the option to view
as html /ascii, however I do get pestered everytime asking if I want
to download Adobe Acrobat when the link is to a .pdf file.

... make them look like they've archived more content
than they actually have. I hadn't noticed this problem with
Altavista in the past though.

This was a hypothetical (albeit relevant search) in my first post :
(swimming or cycling) near masters near (records or results)

So I ran it through Altavista, and there was indeed a promising page
that had no occurrence of "masters" - I will post this link sometime
to prove my point (and give the Google comparison).

Best wishes,
Paul
2003-09-16,Tue Z13:11:45.872

In article <nnq.34611182.0309160515.5773b164 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>,
postmaster (AT) pwi (DOT) mailshell.com (Paul Brown) writes...

You can go beyond the "simple" Google interface by using things
like minus characters for phrases you want to not see in the

So how do you do that, -"exclusion phrase"
and then this will not reject "Exclusion phrase" or "exclusion-phrase"
will it?

I'm not sure if it's case-sensitive or not, personally I rarely
have an occasion for that kind of specificity. (most proper names
are not easily confused with regular words.. although there are
a few but in such a case I usually quote the entire name, and
that eliminates the problem in general)

Also not sure if it ignores punctuation - but here again that is
often desirable because many documents have unpredictable punctuation
and might not show up in results if your search is too pedantic that
way.

Bear in mind that Google has an "advanced search" with various
options that can help narrow down queries considerably. This
includes things like only searching for query terms within the
URL, or the title of the page, as opposed to the body, etc.
I don't think you can do that kind of thing with Altavista.
Other search limits include searching only for particular types
of documents (ie MS Word files, or Adobe Acrobat files) or
only results that are located in a particular domain.

Google does the same thing. They also will provide a HTML equivalent
to most PDF documents for those who either don't have a PDF reader
or who prefer to view a document as HTML. Obviously all of these
things mean that at some point, Google had to decode and/or archive
all of this information - and store a pretty significant portion of
it on Google's own servers.

Not quite - I am talking about actual URLs to a PDF file, but from
what you say it appears the engine server needs to have the content in
ascii form to be searchable. I have never noticed the option to view
as html /ascii, however I do get pestered everytime asking if I want
to download Adobe Acrobat when the link is to a .pdf file.

You must not have used Google very much then, because in my experience
nowadays, almost every time a search result page lists a PDF file,
Google provides an alternative link to view the file as HTML.

Go to Google and type the following query:

cisco univercd


On the first page of results there are 2 links to PDF files. Note
the secondary links to "View as HTML".



--
* Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which *
* differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are *
* even incapable of forming such opinions. -- Albert Einstein *
* *
* To send email, remove numbers and spaces: pjkusenet64 @ ekahuna27 . com *
* Simple answers are for simple minds. Try a new way of looking at things. *

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 07:02:01 -0700, "Philip J. Koenig"
<See_email_ (AT) ddress_below (DOT) This_one_is.invalid> wrote:

So how do you do that, -"exclusion phrase"
and then this will not reject "Exclusion phrase" or "exclusion-phrase"
will it?


I'm not sure if it's case-sensitive or not,

its not. further, it ignores all punctuation too, its all treated as a
whitespace. AFAIK, altavista did the same, the keyword index was stored
as hash codes without regard to specific content.