Advanced AOL Web Searching

Don Bradbury tweaks the AOL search engine for speed

The search facility in AOL is useful for those who need power web searching. But one way to things speed up is to use the little known trick of specifying the search word or phrase in the text search box, immediately followed by (without quotes) "site:www.searchme.com", where searchme.com is the web site you desire to search.

Thus, if you want to look up current comment on the word "digital" on the New Scientist web site, for example, you could try entering:

digital site:www.newscientist.com

in the search entry box, and then hit Enter. It will take you straight to relevant pages.

Or if you want to see current news in terms of the age of the universe on your favourite cosmology web site, for example, try entering:

"Age of the Universe" http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

where you'll need the usual quotes around a phrase.

It's better than trawling page after page on web sites where what you need to know may or may not be present.

This power searching of a single site will not work in every case - it depends on the type of database you're interrogating - but it's certainly worth a try.

Don Bradbury