Search Engine Tips

The altavista search engine has some cool shortcuts that can help you zero in on the exact information you may need. The following are some of the search attributes the altavista folks have built into their web search engine to make searching quicker, and our life a little easier (www.altavista.com).

1. "anchor:" plus any word will find all occurrences of the word where it is used in an anchor in any web page. For example, anchor:ezine will produce all occurrences where the word "ezine" is found in an anchor.

2. "domain:" plus any of the domain names or two letter country codes such as "gov," "edu," or "au," will find all the domain names with "gov," "edu," or "au" as an ending. For example, "domain:gov" will produce all domains containing "gov" at the end. You could then continue the search for all government bids by typing in "bids" and checking "search within these results" box.

3. "host:" plus any host name portion of a URL will give all the pages under that site. For example, "host:msn.com" will produce all the web pages listed in the "msn.com" site.

4. "image:" plus any word will return all sites where the word is found in an image tag. For example, "Image:computer" will return sites where the word "computer" is found within an image tag.

5. "link:" plus any URL will produce all the web sites that link to that URL. For example, "link:www.msn.com" returns all the sites that have links to "www.msn.com."

6. "title:" plus any word or words will find all sites that have those word(s) in the title. For example, "title:msn" returns all the sites where "msn" is found in the title.

7. "url:" plus any word returns all the sites where the word is found somewhere in the url. For example, "url:msn" returns all web sites where "msn" is found somewhere in the url.