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Everyone is right about using the NEAR fuzzy logic command in AltaVista. I love AltaVista, but it's not the best at handling this fuzzy logic. There are others out there that handle them better. I'll review AltaVista first since everyone is familiar with it, but stay tuned until the later part of this article to learn how to search the others.
NEAR searching is very useful for opening up a narrow search to include other possible combinations of a set of words. AltaVista considers near to be within 10 words to the left or right of the first term. Like this:
Nurse NEAR licensed
That will return pages containing the term Nurse where it appears within ten words of licensed. This way you catch all the types of licensed nurses like Licenced Vocational Nurse and Licensed Practical Nurse. But you also catch the other ones like "Registered nurse in emergency room. Provided and supervised licensed..." where Nurse is 7 words away from Licensed.
In contrast you don't find the "Licensed Driver" who was a "Sketch Nurse" in a play in Wisconsin (read her resume at http://suzanneadams.com/resume.htm ). To further illustrate, in AltaVista a search for "nurse NEAR licensed AND title:resume" returned 63 documents, while "nurse AND licensed AND title:resume" returned 103.
But the fun doesn't end here. Broaden your horizon a little and use two other extremely powerful search engines. One very old, and one very new. I am talking about AOL and Vivisimo.
AOL
AOL has the little known ability to search with three Boolean Near, which I have used for many years, but also the ability to use the search commands ADJ and W/n.
"What is that?" you ask?
ADJ means directly adjacent, with it you find documents that contain what's on the left directly in front of what's on the right of your keyword. ADJ is different than "double quotes" for three reasons. Fist, ADJ in AOL Search automatically allows for root word variants or truncation as in program, programming, and programmer. Second, ADJ can connect complex expressions. For example: (engineer or developer or architect) adj software finds items containing either software engineer, software developer or software architect. Finally, unlike "quoted phrases" your words can be on either side of each other not necessarily in order. So to find both versions of database next to design you would have to use ("design database" OR "database design") in another search engine.
W/n is a proximity operator that gives you the power to manually set how close you want things to be. It will find documents with your requested word occurring within a specified number of words to the right of your keyword. Use any number for "n". Example: optical W/5 engineer finds documents in which optical occurs within five words after, to the right of, engineer - as in optical systems engineer, optical board level design engineer, optical long-haul systems engineer, etc. It will look only for words in order of "optical" fist then any other words numbering up to five, and finally "engineer" but not the other way around.
Clusty , formerly Vivisimo
An automated, hierarchical, conceptual, just-in-time clustering engine, Vivisimo is much more than meta-search. There are many reasons, but the most relevant for this article is its ability to offer total control. You can search with the most advanced traditional commands like image:, title:, url:, link:, linktext:, host:, site:, domain:, related:, and text:, in addition to every form of Boolean both traditional and Fuzzy like AND, +, OR, |, AND NOT, -, NEAR and ~.
Since this is not a search engine of its own but rather uses results from Yahoo, MSN, Fast, Netscape, Open Directory, Direct Hit, Looksmart, AskJeeves, Lycos, AOL and HotBot, use the advanced commands as you would with any or all of those. Notice the absence of Google and AltaVista? Also, be aware that Near is only used by AOL and Lycos, and that on Lycos Near means within 25 words. Vivisimo should handle command translation for you so if you use "host:" it should translate that to "url.host:" for Fast and domain: for HotBot. If you want clarification on who uses what commands and how refer to Danny Sullivan's easy reference chart at SearchEngine Watch.
NEAR searching is very useful for opening up a narrow search to include other possible combinations of a set of words. AltaVista considers near to be within 10 words to the left or right of the first term. Like this:
Nurse NEAR licensed
That will return pages containing the term Nurse where it appears within ten words of licensed. This way you catch all the types of licensed nurses like Licenced Vocational Nurse and Licensed Practical Nurse. But you also catch the other ones like "Registered nurse in emergency room. Provided and supervised licensed..." where Nurse is 7 words away from Licensed.
In contrast you don't find the "Licensed Driver" who was a "Sketch Nurse" in a play in Wisconsin (read her resume at http://suzanneadams.com/resume.htm ). To further illustrate, in AltaVista a search for "nurse NEAR licensed AND title:resume" returned 63 documents, while "nurse AND licensed AND title:resume" returned 103.
But the fun doesn't end here. Broaden your horizon a little and use two other extremely powerful search engines. One very old, and one very new. I am talking about AOL and Vivisimo.
AOL
AOL has the little known ability to search with three Boolean Near, which I have used for many years, but also the ability to use the search commands ADJ and W/n.
"What is that?" you ask?
ADJ means directly adjacent, with it you find documents that contain what's on the left directly in front of what's on the right of your keyword. ADJ is different than "double quotes" for three reasons. Fist, ADJ in AOL Search automatically allows for root word variants or truncation as in program, programming, and programmer. Second, ADJ can connect complex expressions. For example: (engineer or developer or architect) adj software finds items containing either software engineer, software developer or software architect. Finally, unlike "quoted phrases" your words can be on either side of each other not necessarily in order. So to find both versions of database next to design you would have to use ("design database" OR "database design") in another search engine.
W/n is a proximity operator that gives you the power to manually set how close you want things to be. It will find documents with your requested word occurring within a specified number of words to the right of your keyword. Use any number for "n". Example: optical W/5 engineer finds documents in which optical occurs within five words after, to the right of, engineer - as in optical systems engineer, optical board level design engineer, optical long-haul systems engineer, etc. It will look only for words in order of "optical" fist then any other words numbering up to five, and finally "engineer" but not the other way around.
Clusty , formerly Vivisimo
An automated, hierarchical, conceptual, just-in-time clustering engine, Vivisimo is much more than meta-search. There are many reasons, but the most relevant for this article is its ability to offer total control. You can search with the most advanced traditional commands like image:, title:, url:, link:, linktext:, host:, site:, domain:, related:, and text:, in addition to every form of Boolean both traditional and Fuzzy like AND, +, OR, |, AND NOT, -, NEAR and ~.
Since this is not a search engine of its own but rather uses results from Yahoo, MSN, Fast, Netscape, Open Directory, Direct Hit, Looksmart, AskJeeves, Lycos, AOL and HotBot, use the advanced commands as you would with any or all of those. Notice the absence of Google and AltaVista? Also, be aware that Near is only used by AOL and Lycos, and that on Lycos Near means within 25 words. Vivisimo should handle command translation for you so if you use "host:" it should translate that to "url.host:" for Fast and domain: for HotBot. If you want clarification on who uses what commands and how refer to Danny Sullivan's easy reference chart at SearchEngine Watch.