Bob's Tips on search engines

You will find a great variety in search engines out there on the web. Some are pretty good, some are crappy. While there may be some good special-purpose engines, and there's lots of good stuff in a categorized engine like Yahoo!, most of the time you can get good results pretty easily from a general-purpose tool. I used to recommend Alta Vista (at one time the undisputed leader), but unfortunately they have fixed something that wasn't broken, many times over. And then fixed it because it was broken. It works, then it doesn't; lather, rinse, repeat.

Search engines come and go, rise and fall, and currently (April 2001) my favorite is Google (http://www.google.com). It's simple, no ads in your face (hope it stays that way!!) and it WORKS.

News flash: a few weeks ago (this written October 2001) Google went ahead and pissed in the soup like everybody else, and my test page is no longer number one -- like there's something better than an exact match? Guess what? It's called PAYOLA!!.

To evaluate a search engine you can try this: put in my full name and see if my home page shows up at the top of the listing. If it doesn't, then try another search engine.

Here's how: if you type in your search string this way


you will get a gazillion pages, all of which have at least one of these three words. Normally those with all three come first, and the closer together they occur, the higher the ranking. My home page is the ONLY page on the whole web that has that exact phrase -- all three right together. (This page doesn't have these words at all -- it has pictures of the words.)

Now the second example: in the typical search-engine grammar, if you put a plus (+) directly in front of each of the names (no space between the plus and the word) you will only get a couple of thousand pages.


A plus in front of a word (or phrase in quotes) means that the word (or phrase) must appear, and since all three words have pluses, we are saying that we only want pages that have all three. Again my home page should be at the top, for the usual reason: it has all three words right together, exactly as entered in the search criteria, and no other page does.

Note also: you can use a minus in front of a word to exclude it. For instance, if you were looking for someone whose name was "Lotto" you wouldn't want information about lotteries. Your search string might then be "lotto -lottery"

The third example uses quotes: type all three of my names with a single space between each one, but this time enclose the whole thing in a set of quotes. Like this:

Now the result should be exactly ONE page, my home page being the only one on the entire web that has the phrase exactly (which is why I'm not putting it on THIS page!).

One final note about capitalization. If you type everything in caps, your searches will only return things in all caps. If you use word caps (Like This) you will get only capitalized words. Normally you want to put your "search strings" in all small letters.

So there ya have it, folks.

Bite here for My home page.