Can searching be customized -- To focus search-results & find up-to-date content?

[justobservant]

When more than one keyword is typed into a search-query, most of the
search-results displayed indicate specified keywords scattered
throughout an entire website of content i.e., this is shown as three
bolded periods '...' in search-result listings.

Additionally, most content is outdated; as many users need up-to-date
content. Hence, filtering-through search-results becomes quite
cumbersome.

The newsgroup listings allow detailed constraints for setting dates.
When will this feature be applied to listings of websites, and blogs?

Options for setting detailed date constraints still contain outdated
content e.g., how can updated content be gleaned from blogs?

It may help narrow-down searches by applying the wild-card character
"*" placed between two keywords in a search-query. The "*"is treated
like the BOOLEAN operator NEAR. e.g., two search-terms appearing within
a few words of each other.

Are there specific search-tools that allow custom searching e.g., for
search-queries to yield search results within the same paragraph-block
of content?

[Joel Shepherd]

In article <11*********************@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups. com>,
ju***********@hotmail.com wrote:

>
Additionally, most content is outdated; as many users need up-to-date
content.

Depends on what the content is, doesn't it? One site that is very useful
to me is an authorized online transcription of a naval reference
originally published in the 60's and 70's. There's no point in updating
the existing content, which is where most of its value lies.

>
The newsgroup listings allow detailed constraints for setting dates.
When will this feature be applied to listings of websites, and blogs?

It already is: <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en>

Perhaps not all search engines implement that functionality.

It may help narrow-down searches by applying the wild-card character
"*" placed between two keywords in a search-query. The "*"is treated
like the BOOLEAN operator NEAR.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong (hopefully with some
superfluous brow-beating), but last I checked "NEAR" was not widely
considered to be a boolean operator. What does "true NEAR false"
evaluate to? Anyway ... Nit-picking aside, '*' seems to have already
acquired a common meaning. Perhaps if one could simply type "Banjo NEAR
Tukwila", that would be adequate.

<hat class="asshole">I'm sorry, was there an HTML question in
there?</hat>

I know that's rude, but it seems to be mandatory.

--
Joel.

[Jack]

ju***********@hotmail.com wrote:

>
Are there specific search-tools that allow custom searching e.g., for
search-queries to yield search results within the same
paragraph-block of content?

Yes, there are; I have been familiar with a product which has a very
rich syntax for expressing search requirements. It allows you to express
proximity, 'between-ness' and order (before and after), and the syntax
covers boolean logic and sub-expressions. You can therefore search for
something like (d 09/01/06) AND ((x NEAR y) BEFORE z). The syntax also
accomodates search targets that have arbitrary fields - not just Subject
and Content - so searching on date-last-modified is certainly possible.
In fact this product could be used to express arbitrary SQL queries
against database tables; so the result-set for a search could in
principle have consisted of a mixture of documents and table-rows.

The product in question has only ever been used to index more-or-less
private collections of data and documents, and I believe it has now been
withdrawn as a standalone product. There may be other similar products;
I'm not familiar with Autonomy in any detail, for example, but they
claim to offer rich searching. Verity have now been acquired by
Autonomy, and their product also provides a measure of rich search
functionality.
http://www.autonomy.com/content/home/
[Warning - this page is pretty useless without Macromedia Flush :-(]

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any public WWW search engine that offers
anything like the power and versatility that I've described. To my
knowledge, none of the tools I've mentioned is used to offer public
searching of the WWW. Public XML search engines that I've looked at
seemed to index tiny numbers of documents, and the quality of their
indexes appeared to be poor.

Supposedly this is the promise of the semantic web:- to be able to
perform global searches using a rich syntax, with terms tailored to the
domain of knowledge with which the search is concerned. But it's my
belief that markup alone is never going to deliver this kind of rich
searching. Apart from any other reason, the majority of documents will
never be marked up to facilitate rich searching based on semantic markup.

--
Jack.
http://www.jackpot.uk.net/

[Harlan Messinger]

ju***********@hotmail.com wrote:

When more than one keyword is typed into a search-query, most of the
search-results displayed indicate specified keywords scattered
throughout an entire website of content i.e., this is shown as three
bolded periods '...' in search-result listings.

[snip]

This newsgroup's topic is authoring HTML for the Web. How to get results
from search engines is off-topic.

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <4j************@individual.net>, Harlan Messinger
<hm*******************@comcast.netwrites

>ju***********@hotmail.com wrote:

>When more than one keyword is typed into a search-query, most of the
search-results displayed indicate specified keywords scattered
throughout an entire website of content i.e., this is shown as three
bolded periods '...' in search-result listings.

[snip]

This newsgroup's topic is authoring HTML for the Web. How to get
results from search engines is off-topic.

It would be helpful if you could suggest a group where it is on-topic.

--
Andy Mabbett
Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

Free Our Data: <http://www.freeourdata.org.uk>

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Andy Mabbett <usenet200309
@pigsonthewing.org.ukwriting in
news:mK**************@pigsonthewing.org.uk:

>>This newsgroup's topic is authoring HTML for the Web. How to get
results from search engines is off-topic.

It would be helpful if you could suggest a group where it is on-topic.

alt.internet.search-engines

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
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