Does anyone remember...

EdFred

EdFred

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...a search engine from the late 90's, maybe into the early 2000's where you could search only upon your search results.
e.g.

initial search: airplane
"your search returned 5,808,421 results"
then you could search only those results for: single engine

"your search returned 41,356 results"
search again only within those results search for: high wing

and so on. you could drill down and get a very specific return.

Now you do a search for it and every engine seems to return everything that contains any of the search terms, even if you try to limit with a +

It popped into my head, but I can't seem to remember what it was.
 
Yahoo Search, Magellen, and Alta Vista date to that time and were popular. All of those are dead.
Yes, the search engines filters don't work anymore. The AI search engines aren't any good either, at least as yet.
 
Not an answer to your question, but lately I have found that grouping terms helps significantly when searching.Using ungrouped phrases it will pop back too many things.

"airplane" + "single engine" + "high wing"

In the above example it goes from 72M results to 125k
 
Crazy we’re talking about the good ol days of the internet! Man how time flies!!!
 
Ah, the days before ChatGPT…
 
I was going to say Metacrawler, but I see they are still around.
 
EdFred said:
...a search engine from the late 90's, maybe into the early 2000's where you could search only upon your search results.
e.g.

initial search: airplane
"your search returned 5,808,421 results"
then you could search only those results for: single engine

"your search returned 41,356 results"
search again only within those results search for: high wing

and so on. you could drill down and get a very specific return.

Now you do a search for it and every engine seems to return everything that contains any of the search terms, even if you try to limit with a +

It popped into my head, but I can't seem to remember what it was.
Click to expand...

Man... I can't remember for sure, but one that I remember using and liking a lot was Ask Jeeves. And I would like the drill down function you mention...
 
They also sell search position. If you search for particular types of businesses in your area, you're going to get top hits from companies that pay google. So there's not an incentive to make the searches more specific or tailored toward people that know how to string ands and ors together.
 
EdFred said:
...a search engine from the late 90's, maybe into the early 2000's where you could search only upon your search results.
e.g.

initial search: airplane
"your search returned 5,808,421 results"
then you could search only those results for: single engine

"your search returned 41,356 results"
search again only within those results search for: high wing

and so on. you could drill down and get a very specific return.

Now you do a search for it and every engine seems to return everything that contains any of the search terms, even if you try to limit with a +

It popped into my head, but I can't seem to remember what it was.
Click to expand...
Here is a great article that outlines the flow of the various search engines offered in 1998:
https://www.llrx.com/1998/06/researchwire-search-engines-compared-which-is-right-for-you/

In particular, I think you are remembering InfoSeek:
Above article said:
Infoseek is another search engine that permits field restrictions to be built into its searches. However, Infoseek’s most unique feature is its ability to narrow searches in levels. Infoseek allows searchers to begin with a broad search and retrieve a certain set of results. Searchers can then perform a second search with the option of searching through only the results from the first search, rather than searching the entire database of web pages all over again. Searches can continue to be narrowed in this fashion until you get the results you want.

Infoseek’s advanced search form assists with search construction. It allows the search to be restricted by domain or location, and also allows it to be focused to one of several topical categories.
Click to expand...
Man...is that link a trip down memory lane...
 
I have noticed recently that on Google, enclosing words (or phrases) in double quotes now seems to mean MUST include. If a phrase is specified the entire exact phrase is matched.

[+Airplane] - doesn't appear to work now as - must include Airplane.

["Airplane" "single engine"]

upload_2023-5-10_10-44-5.png
 

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EdFred said:
I exclusively use duck duck go. Still doesn't work as good as whatever search engine that used to be.
Click to expand...
Too bad the pre-search-engine Yahoo! is gone or you could go through its categories to find Search Engines and get the one you want. Now, search engines are so bad that they can't even tell you about a search engine!

Here's a 2003 article about bygone search engines: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2003/03/04/where-are-they-now-search-engines-weve-known-loved/

Some of those don't ring a bell for me, but others do. Maybe something in the list will jog your memory and help you sleep at night. Good luck!
 
Albany Tom said:
They also sell search position. If you search for particular types of businesses in your area, you're going to get top hits from companies that pay google. So there's not an incentive to make the searches more specific or tailored toward people that know how to string ands and ors together.
Click to expand...
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
They sell ads.
Example - when I search for Aircraft Spruce I get:
View attachment 117154

along with an ad for my pilot store.
Click to expand...

Jeff Oslick said:
The key with DDG is the results of the search and associated ads are limited to just that search, they don't end up permeating everything else you see and do on the internet. i.e., it is far less creepy.
Click to expand...
Thanks. The few times I used it, I didn't notice ads, hence my question.
 
Seems like that function is just the same as using an AND operator, which you can do with google.
 
EdFred said:
Nope. not even close.
Click to expand...
I'm not going to pretend that I know what goes on behind the scenes when executing a Google search and how the results may be "influenced" by profit motives, but please explain how your initial request is different than using an AND operator in engines that allow for Boolean operators?

And Google represents that they allow for the use of Boolean operators.
 
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Baked Potato said:
And Google represents that they allow for the use of Boolean operators.
Click to expand...

It's like the Seinfeld bit about auto rental places. They ALLOW the use of boolean operators, their search engine just doesn't pay much if any attention to them.
 
Albany Tom said:
It's like the Seinfeld bit about auto rental places. They ALLOW the use of boolean operators, their search engine just doesn't pay much if any attention to them.
Click to expand...
I agree that Google blows - but are you sure that the AND operator doesn't work? I tried this:
"jerry seinfeld" AND Boolean
(Letter case matters, to my understanding, to get the operators to be recognized). I got a bunch of results, and by first glance at least it seems that my hits included both the phrases "Jerry Seinfeld" and also the word Boolean. And to me that seems to be the same thing that @EdFred is looking for per the first post in this thread.

If google is broken, then I'll fully accept that. However in a properly working engine that follows established Boolean logic, the use of those operators will allow you to do exactly what he's asking for.

Edit - I don't know about other search engines. A quick google search (hah) tells me that duckduckgo no longer supports Boolean operators, but that Bing does. I haven't tested them.
 
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I tried it...and it does work better than I expected if you put all the words in quotes. Test was ("radio direction finding" and "phase angle" and "Vietnam"). If you leave out the quotes, those words are optional. If you quote everything, the first results have all the items, but past about the top things it will drop things out. It does work much better than I thought it would, the quotes matter, but it will return listings that don't fit the match.

So I didn't want to, but I did learn something today...
 
What are you guys smoking?

Google always has used a default AND operator between search words.

It also uses some kind of fuzzy matching that quite effectively gets round misspellings. I am pretty sure google is now a LOT fuzzier that it was. Maybe this creates an impression of OR logic.

At one time +word would force an exact match but that seems to be deprecated, however "word" does, I suspect, do an equivalent task. Or it did last week.

[] = search box

[tiger aircraft aa-5b]
Returns to ME (you may get different) only results as if I had used
[tiger AND aircraft AND aa-5b]
and boolean logic worked

There are NO, ZERO animals returned. (I checked 3 pages)

If I now use
tiger OR aircraft OR aa-5

I get various different aircraft, aa-5's AND actual tigers, as in cats.

In conclusion google still does a default AND search, however it can be overridden by specifying OR.

Following is on the first page:-

upload_2023-5-13_3-8-18.png
 
I tested that the AND wasn't case sensitive, but didn't check that it might not be needed at all. As far as quotes go, from the test I did, without the quotes it appears to be as if the word isn't AND'd at all.
 
Bing was mentioned above so I started up the ms browser and got a message that bing search now uses AI

Really seemed like the beginning of a sci-fi horror movie. Need AI tracking removal service
 
MSN or ask Jeeves?

My grandma worked at the library and she'd give us the old encyclopedias. I think I might be getting old being able to remember when those were the default.
 
Albany Tom said:
I tested that the AND wasn't case sensitive, but didn't check that it might not be needed at all.
Click to expand...

It appears that as you say AND is not case sensitive — because it is IGNORED. Sorry, but I don't think you are testing what you think you are testing.

I think I have established in the previous post that logical AND between words is the default (I put it in upper case here only try to make it clear for the reader).

So what does specifying another logical AND operator do to a search. Well, I don't know boolean algebra but to a layperson [Fred AND AND Mary] would seem to be the same as [Fred AND Mary].

I think that the extra and/AND is simply stripped out with all the other very common words such as if, to, ...

By the way:-

OR is case sensitive. I used upper case as reported earlier because I had a vague memory that it might be necessary, and because it was clearer for the reader.

I have now tested.
[tiger or aircraft or aa-5]
ALL images have aa-5 so default AND is operating.
That is the "or" is ignored.
upload_2023-5-17_7-44-38.png


[tiger OR aircraft OR aa-5]
Now we get a mixture of image subjects
"OR" is working.
upload_2023-5-17_7-46-25.png
 
Google support for + was dropped in 2011.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

A change in how the double quotes work happened last year.

https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-search-results-when-you-use-quotes/


Sometimes people know they absolutely, positively only want webpages that mention a particular word or phrase. For example, maybe you want to find out about phone chargers but only those that support wireless charging. Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.​

Now we’re making quoted searches better. The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document. That means you can more easily identify where to find them after you click the link and visit the content. On desktop, we’ll also bold the quoted material.​

In the past, we didn’t always do this because sometimes the quoted material appears in areas of a document that don’t lend themselves to creating helpful snippets. For example, a word or phrase might appear in the menu item of a page, where you’d navigate to different sections of the site. Creating a snippet around sections like that might not produce an easily readable description.​

We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this.
​
Also, in my experience the image search function tends to play looser with search operators than the text function does.
 
Anyone remember the Wayback search? Would permit you to see what a website looked like in the past. That helped me with an investigation in a prior life.
 
kshaw said:
Anyone remember the Wayback search? Would permit you to see what a website looked like in the past. That helped me with an investigation in a prior life.
Click to expand...
It's still alive!

https://archive.org/web/

logo_wayback_210x77.png
 
EdFred said:
...a search engine from the late 90's, maybe into the early 2000's where you could search only upon your search results.
e.g.

Now you do a search for it and every engine seems to return everything that contains any of the search terms, even if you try to limit with a +

It popped into my head, but I can't seem to remember what it was.
Click to expand...

Used to be able to use a "-" to eliminate certain results. That would sure be handy these days.
 
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