Talk given at the Online Information Conference 2013 - called Google vs. the Rest: Advanced Search Differences Between Google, Bing, Blekko and Other Search Tools. Session accompanying Phil Bradley - given on 20 November 2013. Includes a 1 minute video of the first slide, taken by Evgeny Yushchuk (Евгений Леонидович Ющук), Professor of Urals State University of Economics

1. Online Information 2013
Google versus the Rest
Advanced Search Differences between
Google, Bing, Blekko & Other Search Tools
Arthur Weiss
Email: a.weiss@aware.co.uk / Twitter: @awareci
www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
20 November 2013
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

2. What is Search Engine “Advanced Search”
• An option to search for specific content going beyond the
standard search listings
 Location of keywords e.g. in titles or the URL
 File type for material e.g. mp3 or pdf files, or RSS feeds
 Keywords in particular types of material e.g. blogs, discussions,
or describing images, etc.
 Keywords from specified site, or geography
 Keywords in proximity to other words and/or wildcard searches
 Similar or related material
 Sites that link to or from a web page / domain
 Exclude certain types of material or key words
 Limit search to a set of custom sites
 Change relevancy e.g. date order, or weight search by a keyword,
etc.
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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3. Does “Advanced Search” still exist
Advanced search is in retreat…
• Maintaining advance search capabilities has a cost for the
search engines
• Only a small minority of searchers use advanced search
options
• As “search” becomes more accurate for the average user,
support for advanced search decreases further
Advanced search features have been
disappearing for many years
• Altavista’s case sensitive and wild-card searches were never
replicated by any other search engine
• Yahoo’s Linkdomain: disappeared 2 years ago….
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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4. Lost Search Functionality
“Yes, it's been deprecated. Why? Because too
few people were using it to make it worth the
time, money, and energy to maintain….”
Re: Google’s Synonym search ~ operator
“…we’ve had to remove certain features, such
as Instant Previews. Instant previews saw very
low usage by our users....”
Re: Google Instant Previews
We “weren’t seeing enough usage of this filter
to maintain it in the toolbar.”
Re: Google’s “Related” search filter option
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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5. Advanced Search – on its way out?
August 2000
August 2006
July 2011
August 2001
September 2011
August 2002
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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6. Advanced search is not easy to find
On the home page in
the “Settings” option at
the bottom of the page
OR in the cogwheel on
the right of search
result lists
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

7. Advanced search is not easy to find
Blekko “advanced search”: “We no
longer require users to be familiar with
our advanced search features to see
the benefits of slashtag categories….”
https://search.blekko.com/help
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

8. And no consistency…
• Cogwheel is the most common option for finding
Advanced Search on Google – but not consistent
 Currently no advance search for
news, books, videos….
 An inverted triangle in Google Scholar
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

9. So how do you do advanced search on Google
Slight differences
for Patents search,
Google Scholar,
etc.
Or search directly from the search bar using search operators
• Currently listed as supported: site:, link:, related:, * (wildcard), OR,
- (NOT), .. (Number range)
• Not listed (but work – and on advanced form): intitle:, filetype:, inurl:,
intext: and a few others.
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk

10. Related
Proximity
© AWARE 2013
✔
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*
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✘
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✔
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OR
✔
title:()
✔
Gigablast
Duck
DuckGo
Blekko
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✘
✔
✘
✘
✘
inbody
inbody
✘
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✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✘
✔
Date
Date
✔
sort
sort
✔? /similar
✘
NEAR
✘
✘
Yandex
intitle
inurl
Exact match
site
filetype
- (Exclude)
Boolean
Date search
✔
✔
✔
intext
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✔
OR
Baidu
“quotes”
Bing
Google
Advanced Search – What’s Shared
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Title:
✔
+
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✔
✔
✔
✘
✔
?
✘
✘
✘
✘
✘
+, !
✔
mime:
~
* , /+2
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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11. Advanced Search – What’s Different
Google
Unique search options & filters (e.g. .. Numeric search)
Can search for specific material – blog posts,
academic, books, patents, etc. (with separate search
options & filters)
Bing
Search operators such as: Contains, feed, prefer, IP
Bing’s Academic search offers different features to
Google Scholar
Blekko
Focuses on eliminating “content farm” spam
Slash commands offer search categorisation options
(although now hard to find)
DuckDuckGo
Focuses on privacy & not tracking users
!Bang commands allow for quick searching on multiple
popular sites (e.g. “phil bradley” !amazon)
Available for TOR deep/dark web searches
(https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.to)
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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12. Advanced Search – What’s Different
Baidu
Best for Chinese pages. Also offers multiple other
options e.g. patent search, music, mail, social…
Yandex
Focus on Slavic languages plus English & French.
Extensive proximity options, plus filters for people,
traffic, news, etc. “Yandex Islands” gives one-stop data
Gigablast
Open source search engine.
Sitelink: search operator finds links to a site
MillionShort
Uses Bing API – eliminating top sites (based on Alexa)
from search
WolframAlpha
“Knowledge Engine” allowing for specialist / niche
searching – with results in tabular format
Zanran
Search for semi-structured tabular or graphical data
English language only
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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13. Advanced Search Support Pages
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_
operators&hl=en
http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff808421.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795620.aspx
http://help.blekko.com/index.php/advanced-search-features/
https://dukgo.com/help/results/syntax
http://www.baidu.com/search/skill.html
http://www.baiduguide.com/baidu-seo-guide/baidu-search-operators/
http://help.yandex.com/search/how-to-search/searchoperators.xml
http://www.gigablast.com/help.html
© AWARE 2013
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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14. Any Questions?
Arthur Weiss is the managing director of AWARE - a UK based
consultancy specialising in marketing & competitive intelligence analysis.
Contact Details:
Web Sites:
www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
E-mail: a.weiss@aware.co.uk
Twitter: @awareci
Telephone:
Fax:
© AWARE 2013
+44 20 8954 9121
+44 20 8954 2102
Tel: +44 20 8954 9121 • Fax: +44 20 8954 2102 • Web: www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
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