The ability to search the net for words or phrases NEAR each other was why I loved Alta Vista once upon a time (and also that it was a DEC product – my favorite computer company ever – helped too). A few other of the bigger search engines, like AOL, did likewise.
Sadly, those days are gone.
Oh, Alta Vista will still let you include the keyword (or “~” char), but it clearly ignores it. I don’t know why these engines dropped support for that, because I found it extremely valuable.
Does anyone know of any decent search engine that still does NEAR searching?
You read my mind-I was about to post the same question. I hate Googling something, only to find out that the two key terms I used don’t have anything to do with each other on the page in question. Hence I spend many fruitless minutes flipping through page after page looking for one where they are in the same phrase/header/sentence.
To the right of the URL on each Google search page, most hits have “Cached” next to it. If you click that, you will go to the page Google found to you, but on the top it will let you know which search terms are highlighted on that page.
For example, if you Google gaggle brick sleuth, and hit “Cached” on the first hit, on the top of the page it says, "These search terms have been highlighted: gaggle brick sleuth ". But if you click “Cached” on the second hit, on the top of the page it says, “These search terms have been highlighted: gaggle brick
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: sleuth”.
I miss Alta Vista. I don’t know who bought it out when and killed the search engine it once had and replaced it with the piece of shit it uses now — I have the impression that AV changed hands more than once? — but it’s reprehensible.
It’s not just “NEAR” that’s busted; complex boolean search strings don’t work right either.
I miss the “real” AltaVista, too. I wonder if Boolean constructions are just complicated enough for average humans that search engines you interact with that way don’t survive?
In a similar vein, I remember a “NOT” feature in altavista. Let’s say I wanted to search about Pumpkins (growing, recipes, whatever) but I didn’t want to wade through a million Halloween articles.
In altavista, I could type “pumpkin NOT halloween” and get a good result. Can you do that with google?
Yes. Simply add a “-” in front of whatever words you want to include. For example, if you wanted to find the land speed record for cars that didn’t use jet propulsion, you could try fastest car record -jet.
Proximity of terms may well be factored into Google’s algorithm, but it certainly looks to me that other factors – such as number of links to a given page – are given far more prominence. I almost always see the same thing that John DiFool experiences: no proximity of terms at all, at least not in the first sets of finds.
I didn’t see anything that would work exactly like near. In addition to excluding terms using the - function referenced above, you can use + to include terms that are essential to your search, although that seems to be limited to terms that Google would normally exclude (common words, single characters). The order of your search terms affects your results, though; that might have a similar effect.
I recall reading that the exact phrase search (search in quotation marks) also looked for words near each other, but I can’t find a cite for that.
Even some of that doesn’t work, as weak as most of it is even when it does work. I don’t think a single “English only” Google search I’ve ever performed hasn’t come up with plenty of non-English “hits”. Likewise, I’ve had very little success with a date-constrained Google search; the results just seemed random.
Now, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were not Google’s fault but rather reflected the good ol’ GIGO nature of the web, but still. Surely with all the competition among search engines someone would think: “I know, I’ll provide a better search algorithm, with features that Alta Vista used to have!”
Actually, you can access all of those features from the main search, too, with keywords like site: and quote marks and - and the like, and I actually find it a bit easier to use that way.
Plus, I don’t have Google bookmarked, since I have it as my home page instead.
I used to have access to NEXIS, and got very used to the ability to search for certain words near one another, and in particular to specify how close or distant these words should occur. I may not be remembering 100%, but I seem to recall that if I wanted to restrict my search to articles where “john” appears within three words of “kennedy,” I’d type john w/3 kennedy, which would’ve returned articles with the text “John F. Kennedy” or “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” or “John Jacob Jingleheimer Kennedy” (not one of the better known members of the Kennedy brood, alas).
Many’s the time I find myself wishing for this capability in a web search engine. Haven’t found it though.
