I have a few questions about searching for things online. It’s probably right under my nose, but I’ve looked long and hard for the answers and was unable to find them.
Ok,
How do you look for a combination of words instead of a search of each individual word? Basically, how do I look for: “Jim Bob Steak House”, and not get results that say: “Jim and Bob like to grill their steak outside when it’s to beautiful a day to stay in the house”? How do you look for a phrase or a grouping of words? I thought it was “Jim+Bob+Steak+House”, But that doesn’t seem to work.
How do I search for sites that DON’T have a particular word in it? For example, if I was looking up the word “Signs”, but I wasn’t looking for information on the MOVIE “Signs”, would it be at all possible to specify that you don’t want the search to include any web sites with the words “Mel Gibson”?
I saw an old high school friend the other day and he gave me his E-Mail address. I took the thing home and lost it. I know his screen name had “Rock Star” in it, but that’s about it (AOL SN). He’s on classmates.com, but I don’t have the money to join that thing for a years time, when all I want is one persons E-Mail. I tried the white pages, but he is unlisted. Any tips on this?
For Google, I would use “Jim Bob Steak House” as typed, in quotes. That forces the engine to look specifically for that exact phrase, so if there’s not a restaurant called “Jim Bob Steak House” you’ll get nothing.
Alternatively, to get more results if that doesn’t work, try +jim +bob +“steak house”, which means it’ll search for the phrase “steak house” and the words jim and bob and return only results that include both the phrase and the two names. That’s what the plus sign is for. With this, if the first search for the whole phrase returned nothing, this second method could unearth a web page that includes “Jim & Bob’s Steak House”.
The first trick is to use Google. For 99.999% of what you’ll ever search for, it is the best tool for the job.
Searching for phrases in Google is as easy as surrounding them in inch marks. “This is a whole phrase.” The previous is only searched for as a whole phrase when surrounded by the inch marks.
Specifying not to look for a word is done by prepending it with a hyphen. Don't search for -this' (Single-quotes are simply a notational convenience here. Don't include them in a real search.) will search for Don’t’ and search' but not for this’, because you told it not to, or for', because for’ is a `stopword’. A stopword is a word that Google normally omits because it is so common. A lot of the small words (articles and such) are stopwords.
How do you force Google to search for a stopword? One way is to include it as part of a “delimited phrase”. The whole phrase is searched for, including any stopwords the phrase may contain. Another way is to prepend it with a plus sign. `+Every word here will +be searched +for.’ does not contain any words that won’t be searched for.
Searching for an email address is harder. If your friend posted to Usenet under that email, you might be able to find some archived articles from him by going to http://groups.google.com/ and searching for `author:friendsemail@aol.com’. GoogleGroups has archives going back to the birth of Usenet in the early 1980s (they took over DejaNews’s archives when that service died the death, so GoogleGroups is sometimes called Gooja).
Google also has various special features, but I’ve covered the basics. I’ll review the most common special features if you want.
First, which search engine are you using? Google will accept your first example within quotation marks as a single string, thus “Jim Bob Steak House” will place all examples of that string first while Jim Bob Steak House will take a stab at the string, but bring back lot’s of other stuff that my have higher indexes (based on hits and links to the site).
For any search engine, they should usually have an Advanced link that will take you to a special page to tailor your search. This should include AND and OR tags and may include NOT tags that will eliminate the stuff you’re trying to avoid.
As for your e-mail search, a few years ago there were several nice engines such as Bigfoot, but I dn’t know how many of them still survive.
It loads slowly and is infested with pop-ups, but it provides screens to multiple search engines by name, address, phone, e-mail, etc., so once you get there, you don’t have to keep figuring out where to go next. (And if you get to one that really works well, you can always bookmark its home page so that you don’t have to go through reversedirectory the next time.)
Oh, And e-mail a Mod to ask them to close your mis-post in GD. (Just open your thread, click on the “Report this post to a moderator” link at the bottom of your own post, and ask them to kill it for being in the wrong Forum.)
MyFootsZZZ: This is a longshot, but you could try putting your friend’s full name (in quotation marks, of course), and then aol.com into a search query:
The reason: Sometimes, when people post to an online guest book, their name will appear as “Firstname Lastname, <name@domain.com>”. And sometimes on searches, such online guest books will appear. I’ve found addresses that way at work.
Google has a number of connecting characters that turn words into phrases. For example, the period character works this way - i.e. Jim.Bob and Steak.House. You can indeed force sites to be excluded by using the minus sign, e.g. jim.Bob -Frank
Crusoe: I’ve never heard of the period being usable that way.
Upon inspection (http://google.com) it does indeed work that way. Thank you for informing us all of that useful behavior.
http://www.google.com/help/features.html – This documents some of Google’s less obvious functionality. You can perform phone book lookups by simply typing input in any of these forms:
[ul]
[li](either Firstname or Firstinitial), Lastname, (either City or State or both OR area code or zip code (presumably US-only))[/li][li]phone number including area code[/li][li]Lastname, (either City and State or zip code)[/li][/ul]Google will only return listed numbers (naturally), and it may only find listed numbers within a limited domain. It’s still worth a shot.
AOL does not put the names of its users in any online directory (they get enough spam as it is). Try googling your friend’s name. It’s a long shot, but if he has a web page, you might find an e-mail address.