Search Engines
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USA.gov’s search engine is powered by Bing, so to search effectively at USA.gov, you would need to be a proficient Bing searcher. For those of you used to Google searching, you will find that searching at Bing/USA.gov is very different in some instances. USA.gov provides no search tips and we were unable to easily find any at Bing. However, on USA.gov’s Advanced Search page (which you...
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One of the most popular "hidden" Google search feature we discuss in our live Cybersleuth Investigative Research MCLE Seminars is the ability to use the tilde (~) in a Google search to indicate that you want Google to return results for the keyterm you've entered AND any synonyms that Google automatically recognizes. Unfortunately, Google has recently done away with this feature. Google...
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On July 8, 2013, Altavista ceased to exist. 1995 2013 (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })(); On that day, Yahoo...
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Yahoo! no longer recognizes the proximity connector NEAR. Yahoo! does still recognize an asterisk as a proximity connector representing the concept of "within one word." To conduct a "within one word" search at Yahoo!, the search would be expressed as follows: "Mark * Rosch" (including the quotation marks). We have updated our Search Engine Features Comparison Chart to reflect this change....
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Bing has revamped the way it retrieves and displays search results to prominently include results related to your social network connections - primarily Facebook and Twitter. The new Bing results display interface is broken up into three columns. The widest column, on the left-hand side displays a traditional looking list of relevant "blue link" results. The middle of the three columns, the "...
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Google has redesigned its Web Search home page. There has been alot of discussion online about the black bar across the top of the new design, the choice of the red "overline" and white for the active "tab", and gray for other available tabs. Some people have even chosen to focus on the new square buttons to activate the "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" features that...
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Many paid legal research products such as LexisNexis and Westlaw offer the ability to search for keywords within a certain number of words from one another (a number that you define). For example, some pay databases allow you to search w/ (within any number of words that you indicate, such as w/2), /s (in the same sentence), and /p (in the same paragraph). Google does offer an analogous, but...
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In the Spring of 2010, Google made a major alteration in the way it displayed search results with the introduction of the left-hand sidebar. One of the new additions to the sidebar was the "Updates" option which displayed "real-time" search results drawn from a (seemingly) finite group or sources like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and MySpace. At the time, the majority seemed to be coming from...
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This morning, Google announced a major innovation to the way it processes queries and delivers results - Google Instant. Google Instant takes the auto-complete, predictive suggestions that automatically display under the Google search box as you type your keywords one step further. Google Instant not only displays those predictive suggestions for your search, it also displays a full list of...
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One feature that Google does not offer in its Web search is the ability to create a well-defined proximity search. Unlike paid search products, we cannot indicate how close we want our keywords to be to one another in search results. While Google does offer the asterisk (*) to take the place of one (or more than one) word in a search (e.g., Mark * Rosch), we cannot indicate that we want...
