Came in late, so missed the first 15 minutes; the room is packed, probably a combination of the topic and the fact that Greg Notess (who runs Search Engine Showdown) is an energetic, entertaining presenter.
Some useful nuggets, for those who care about search engine tips and tricks:
Google Answers is searchable—you can find the answers that other people already paid for.
Google Labs has their ‘under development’ tools, like location searching, news alerts, compute, webquotes, etc.
Be aware of varied filtering levels—by default, Google images are “SafeSearch” filtered and text is not.
Advanced search page lets you do things like limit to document type,
but doesn’t list all of the advanced techniques. “How do you search for a web page that has one word in the title, and another word elsewhere on the page?”
Field searching: allintitle: (finds pages with all the words in title), intitle: (finds only the first word or phrase following it). Also can use allinurl: and inurl: , allintext:, allinachor:, site:, and related: (A little bit of info on this is on his site.)
Can get to a cached web page by using cache:url
Find files of a specific type by using filetype: (e.g. filetype:ppt). [Personal note—this would be really useful for finding instructional materials. e.g. filetype:ppt animation for lectures on the topic of animation…]
Can use an asterisk for a word…e.g. “Unbearable * of being”; useful for quotations, variations on a slogan, intellectual property theft/plagiarism. Can find misspellings and plural/singular within unique phrases. [For example, “Well-behaved women * make history” would find the phrase with the correct “seldom” but also the incorrect but often used “rarely”.]
Google limitations: only first 101K of a page (not the case on alltheweb). Limits the number of search terms you can use to ten. No full Boolean text searching; while OR is available, it doesn’t always work properly.
Google has multiple data centers; each data center may have a slightly different version of the database.
I don’t own Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks, alas, so I don’t know how much of this is also presented there… some of it is on Greg’s site, linked above.
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Per O'Reilly's standards, Rael is credited on the cover of Google Hacks, and he may have gone beyond the usual editorial role to provide some of the content as well (I forget), but don't omit Tara Calashain (of ), who is the primary author of the book!
D'oh! please to close my tag (or remove?)...
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