Advanced Search

Advanced search is available with all the mega search engines. But only 0.5% of searchers ever use it.

Advanced search is useful, and this page is written in the hope that people will be inspired to use it more. The advanced search features of the mega search engines are contrasted and compared here. I hope the following list will help you find which search engine might best meet your specific advanced search requirements.

• People, on average, only type 1.3 words into the simple search field before clicking enter. If you feel that you need to refine your search, then don't forget to look for the advanced search link.

Google Advanced Search

Google advanced search is available from a link beside the home page search box. This takes you to a formidable looking page with dozens of search boxes, buttons and pull down menus. Fortunately, looks deceive. If you start at the top and work down you should be able to move forward quite easily. The main search options, and what Google searches for, are:

• Word choice: (i) all the words separately (ii) together as a phrase (iii) at least one of the words (iv) without any of the words.
• Number of results: up to a hundred per page.
• Language: pages in a major world language.
• File format: any, PDF, Postscript, RTF and Microsoft (Word, Excel and Powerpoint).  
• Updated in: past 3 months, 6 months or year.
• Domain: one domain--or for all but that domain.
• Usage rights: free to use, share, or modify.
• Adult site filtering: moderate or strictly.
• PageSpecific: page that link to, or look like, a particular page.
• Topic specific: Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Apple Macintosh, BSD Unix, Linux, Microsoft, U.S. Government, Universities.

Yahoo Advanced Search

Yahoo advanced web search has a very similar look and feel to Google. The word choice, number of results, and date sections offer identical options. But it has other options in the other sections:

• The language section allows you to search for more than one language at the same time.
• The file format section has more options, i.e. plain text and XML/RSS.
• The usage rights section allows you to limit your search to creative commons licensed content.
• Topic specific: Consumer Reports, FT.com (60 days), Factiva, Forrester Research, IEEE publications, LexisNexis, New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, Wall Street Journal (30 days)

MSN Search Builder

MSN Search Builder does some of the same choices as advanced search in Google and Yahoo, although the presentation of them is much different. It is more limited, but includes:

• Country - you can limit your search to sites from a particular country or region.
• Ranking slide bars - allow you to weight your search for pages updated recently, popularity or degree of match.

MSN advanced search deserves praise for not doing things in exactly the same way as the other mega search engines. The Search Builder has the advantage of presenting the user with only a few widgets at each step, rather than a whole page full of them.

Ask Advanced Search

Ask advanced search offers similar options to Google in the word choice boxes. But it encourages the user to add just one word or phrase at a time. This allows the search to be built up gradually, and may be easier for novice users. It also offers language choices, but far fewer of them.

The best feature of Ask Jeeves, compared to the other mega search engines, is the total control you have over choosing the page modified date range. Unlike Google and Yahoo, which only have a few coarse grained options, you can choose any range of dates with Ask.

In this summary of the advanced search features of the mega search engines I have only looked at the options given by the user interface. There may be several other options available through a command line in the search box.