I found it!
July 4, 2004 12:47 PM   Subscribe

Increase your Google-Fu. I've been a user of everyone's favorite search engine since it was in beta, but still failed on searches where others succeeded. It seems that the coolest search operators aren't documented on google.com at all. Now I can aspire to find scary and interesting stuff on the Web.
posted by Daddio (16 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hey, I didn't know about the filetype and cache operators. That's pretty cool. Good post!
posted by vorfeed at 1:16 PM on July 4, 2004


Actually the filetype and cache operators are documented on google.com I think. Allinanchor was new to me however.
posted by fvw at 1:27 PM on July 4, 2004


Fun With Google Searches. Google for the pirate in all of us.
posted by bitpart at 1:50 PM on July 4, 2004


¡Mucho gusto!
posted by bob sarabia at 2:53 PM on July 4, 2004


Cool, thanks!
posted by carter at 4:32 PM on July 4, 2004


Google still lacks some things I want. I recognize the inherent difficulties with my requests.

One, I want it to tokenize punctuation. As a triple Google-fu blackbelt, when I type punctuation in a search, I mean it.

Two, which might obviate the above request, I want to be able to use full regexp when searching.

Three, I want to be able to search by date added to the cache.

Four, I want to be able to search for the modified date on files that have them, including HTML pages.

Five, which might obviate the above request, I want Google to develop an algorithm which will figure out the approximate date a page was made, if it doesn't say so explicity and specifically.

That is all for now.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:51 PM on July 4, 2004


That's very cool. Thanks.

Bitpart: Things like "windows xp" filetype:torrent work quite well too.
posted by ed\26h at 4:52 PM on July 4, 2004


This totally saved my monday. Thanks, Daddio and bitpart.
posted by spazzm at 4:54 PM on July 4, 2004


Comments on Mo Nickels' ideas.

1. Tokenizing punctuation -- why is it interesting?

2. Regular expressions are very interesting, but hard hard hard -- you can imagine why.

3. What does "date added to the cache" mean? Shouldn't that always be the date of the last google crawl? Is this interesting?

4. Searching for the modified date is interesting.

5. Creation date for pages -- you could imagine that you'd approximate it as "first time google saw a page at this URL". Also interesting.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 5:51 PM on July 4, 2004


commengting on MN's ideas and wolf boy's ideas:
  1. Ditto. This would be very useful for searching for latex and perl sytnax and uses.
  2. It would be cool, but alas it's uterly unfeasible wrt computing power required.
  3. I think Mo Nickel's wants waybackmachine-like capabilites. It would be nice, but for 80% of cases the waybackmachine+google is actually enough.
  4. Searching by date would be useful, but it would also probably increase google's active database by a few hundred %. They've probably got the computing power and/or financial means to make it happen, but considering the number of power users who want this to happen, I doubt they will.
  5. see 4.
posted by fvw at 6:07 PM on July 4, 2004


1. Tokenizing punctuation -- why is it interesting?

"scope of $_ in perl"

"2. Regular expressions are very interesting, but hard hard hard -- you can imagine why."

Indeed I can -- no indexing. I'd venture to say this is impossible (sure, computing power will increase, but so will Google's database), but I'm hoping Google will surprise me.

"5. Creation date for pages -- you could imagine that you'd approximate it as "first time google saw a page at this URL". Also interesting."

What I'd like is for Google to join forces with the Internet Archive. Google's crawl is much bigger. I want to see Google cache's of arbitrary pages for arbitrary dates.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:26 PM on July 4, 2004


s/cache's/caches
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:26 PM on July 4, 2004


Oh yeah:

Number six, I want the Google cache to never expire, even when new content appears, unless the site, site owner, robots.txt, or other indicator says it should. This is the best way to build onto the Wayback machine.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:01 AM on July 5, 2004


aha, right -- you want to be able to search punctuation because you are a programmer or such. seems very logical.

Regular expressions aren't impossible.

You do already have some limited globbing on single words in sentences like this.

The never-ending cache is a lovely idea!
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 3:52 PM on July 5, 2004


i've always been pissed off that i couldn't search for "!!!" (the band)
posted by bob sarabia at 7:14 PM on July 5, 2004


Heh. Sorta on a whim today, before seeing any of this, I hit Google with
convert c to feet per second
...and it did. Itself, not in a search result but internally. Nearly spooky.
posted by NortonDC at 7:24 PM on July 6, 2004


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