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

Arthur WeissEmail: a.weiss@aware.co.uk / Twitter: @awareci

www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

20 November 2013

Google versus the RestAdvanced Search Differences between

Google, Bing, Blekko & Other Search Tools

Online Information 2013

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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….

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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?

August 2000

August 2001

August 2002

August 2006

July 2011

September 2011

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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

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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

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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

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So how do you do advanced search on GoogleSlight 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.

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Advanced Search – What’s Shared

Google

Bing BlekkoDuck

DuckGo

BaiduYande

xGigabl

ast

“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)

BingSearch operators such as: Contains, feed, prefer, IPBing’s Academic search offers different features to Google Scholar

BlekkoFocuses on eliminating “content farm” spamSlash 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…

YandexFocus 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 dataEnglish language only

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Advanced Search Support Pageshttps://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.ukE-mail: a.weiss@aware.co.uk

Twitter: @awareci

Telephone: +44 20 8954 9121 Fax: +44 20 8954 2102

Any Questions?