Extending from my previous post on why you should try Yahoo Search, I want to share with you some of the latest innovation from Live Search. Thanks to Amit from the Digital Inspiration who pointed me to these tips! The latest round of innovation from Live Search include various things including previewing of videos and clipping and saving of image search results but for me, the below innovation around the core search functionality really differentiate Live Search from Google and I think a lot of users will find useful.
1. Find pages that contain links to documents, MP3 files, videos and zips
Using the Google “filetype” operator, you always could find specific non-html documents with the keywords you are interested in. For example here is a search for “iPhone filetype:pdf” and Google returns links to the actual PDF documents related to iPhone that it found
But what if I am interested in a web pages that CONTAIN LINKS to various types of documents, kind of a content aggregation page where links to useful resources in specific file format are compiled. Specifically what if I want to find web pages about iPhone on the AT&T website that contains PDF documents ? Whilst you can’t really do this easily using Google search, you can do this quite easily with Live Search using the query “site:att.com iphone contains:pdf” which finds me this page with lots of PDF files about the iPhone !
You can use the “contains” operator to find documents, mp3 files, videos and zips. I am sure it will come in handy for me sometime in the future :+)
2. Limit you searches to sites that contain RSS
Looking for sites that contain RSS feeds so that you can keep up with whatever you were searching for ? The “hasfeeds:” operator allow you to find websites that matches your keyword search and also has an RSS feed on the page. Here my attempt to find sites about “iPhone Jailbreak” and I can subscribe to.
3. Get Live Search Results via RSS feeds
For those of us who now depend on RSS feeds to help us consume the vast amount of information, having your search results as RSS feeds has a number of advantages. Whilst you can always get search results via email using the Google Alert services but strangely Google still hasn’t gotten around to adding the search results RSS subscription functionality. You can however use a third party service feedmysearch to achieve the same thing.
With Live Search, there is an undocumented way to turn search results into feeds directly from Live Search.
Once you have completed your search (”iphone jailbreak” for example)
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone+jailbreak&go=&form=QBRE
You just need to append “&format=rss” to the end of the url. so the above query can be turned into an rss feed by using this url
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone+jailbreak&go=&form=QBRE&format=rss
You can then subscribe to it using your favourite RSS readers. Undocumented, yes, but works like a charm !
Whilst these new features might not warrant a complete switch to Live Search from Google, they give you more options when it comes to general web search and can add to your toolbox of Search kit and make you more productive.
Email This Post To A Friend!Related Posts:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
Thanks for the feedback, do check back for more search tips !