Comments on: Search Lore

Search Lore

sluglicker — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 05:43:53 -0800

How To Build A Google Pre-Filter: You can modify the forms on this page in order to search for different targets: images, music, porn, books, solutions, confidential documents, passwords or whatever.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:03:17 -0800

in fieri, webbit, SERP, crippled results for zombies, quelle vulgarité!, Exempli gratia, raison d'être, Weltanschauung, lavoro interinale, ad hoc. Useful indeed.

By: criticalbill

criticalbill — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:03:44 -0800

I'm pretty sure i didn't understand a single full sentence on that website

By: hoverboards don't work on water

hoverboards don't work on water — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:10:53 -0800

Fravia is a legend, but his site is consciously designed not to give up its deepest secrets without the reader putting some effort into it. Ironic considering it's mostly about searching.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:12:55 -0800

Sorry, that was dismissive sluglicker. Let me work up an example.

By: sluglicker

sluglicker — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:15:30 -0800

Mods: Link is bad. Please change to this.

By: sluglicker

sluglicker — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:18:17 -0800

tellurian: No problem. His site is not U.S. 'centric' (friendly). Lots of good info there.

By: splice

splice — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:19:45 -0800

More generally, searchlores.org has tons of essays and information on web searching. It seems to be down at the moment though. The european site is fravia.com. The layout does take some getting used to, but there are many precious gems within.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:28:40 -0800

Wow, it's as if the Time Cube guy mated with Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Company and their love-child got into web2.0.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:35:47 -0800

OMG! Forget about any excuses sluglicker (as if I care about US centric). I'm astounded at the result for "Knock it on the head" 642 results - 'worth following up', versus 13,300 results - 'wading through crap'. Great find, thank you.

By: sluglicker

sluglicker — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:39:58 -0800

tellurian: You're a moron.

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:45:00 -0800

I don't get it. This is going to help me get porn how?

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:08:02 -0800

tellurian: You're a moron. posted by sluglicker Pardon?

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:37:39 -0800

The title made me think I would be able to search Lore.

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:42:51 -0800

Up against the wall, Sjöberg.

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:43:06 -0800

D'oh.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:48:14 -0800

Oh shit! misunderstanding I hope sluglicker, let me try and explain myself. I recently decided to discontinue blogging (see my profile) and I was looking for a phrase/cliche that would end it the way I wanted to (maybe too obscure but it's the way I think). I ended up with: 1st anniversary of a marriage being - traditional: paper, modern: clock - hence the image. Secondly, how to phrase it. "Knock it on the head" came to mind and it's often used with "time to" as in "Time to knock it on the head", a phrase I'm familiar with. So, I did a search on Google for "Knock it on the head". The results were as reported. That's why I used it as an example here. My 'Great find, thank you.' was genuine.

By: Citizen Premier

Citizen Premier — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:49:38 -0800

Well, I searched for porn and I got this. Highly dissatisfying.

By: rxrfrx

rxrfrx — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:50:32 -0800

The link gave me a headache, and tellurian is making it worse.

By: splice

splice — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:03:42 -0800

The problem with this link is that it assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the seeker. This is basically a simple way to pre-filter your searches. Fravia is big on "portals" for searching different engines in different ways. Witness the main search engines page, for example, which has search forms for a great many search engines. This particular article (How to build a Pre-Google Filter) shows you what you could do if you wanted to include a search form that would search, for example, for ebooks, or for the definition of a word in another language (which I may find useful to find the french equivalent of certain english words or expressions). Once you understand the concept you could apply a similar technique to make a search form for porn, etc. A nice page to read on the site is the webbits page, which lists ways of getting at certain targets (email address lists, mp3 files, images, warez, etc, etc.). Like I said, it takes a while to get used to the whole layout of the site, but there's tons of good things for web seekers. I was going to post the site eventually, I guess someone was less lazy than I.

By: treepour

treepour — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:05:18 -0800

It seems that all this is doing is encapsulating a series of AND and OR operators in a form field. I can see how that could be very convenient if one always wants to search with a given set of AND and OR operators, but it's not like it's getting Google to do something that can't already be done through the normal interface. Or am I missing something here?

By: Pastabagel

Pastabagel — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:11:00 -0800

Jesus, what a mess. It's simpler just to learn google's search operators, than to slog through these pages. Good God.

By: splice

splice — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:37:41 -0800

Like I said, treepour, Pastabagel, Fravia has a thing for "portal pages". Of course, you can feel free to retype those operators into google every time you want to search for an ebook. If you do it regularly enough, you might like a simple page on your computer you can open and type your ebook query in. And while you may think it's simpler to just learn the google operators, the site is about much more than google. For example, the recent article on AllTheWeb's Image Searching Syntax contains some interesting searching techniques, including the use of the Seeker's Oracle tool to generate keywords appropriate to your query. Anyway, not for everyone, and I wish the op had posted the main page and an explanation of what the site is about instead of a semi-obscure recent article posted on the site, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

By: treepour

treepour — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:58:25 -0800

splice, yes having looked around the site some more, I can see this guy's got some clever ideas. Nice.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:32:01 -0800

Pastabagel writes "It's simpler just to learn google's search operators, than to slog through these pages. Good God." That's what I thought, but then I realized that mixed in with the annoying stuff was a lot of helpful info about what to put in the search strings. Like, I know how to use google's search operators, but that doesn't tell me that you can find mp3s more easily by including "index of" as one of the search terms. Or that you can find serial numbers more easily by including the search string "xcx8-19x0". Neither of those are google search operators, they're just things that it never would have occurred to me to ask.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:32:15 -0800

It's the tedium of typing Google's operators over and over again as compared to the time necessary to parse, experiment, fail, and eventually figure out whatever Flavia's getting at. At least Google's operators are clearly explained and can be macro'd in various ways.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:56:03 -0800

ardgedee writes "At least Google's operators are clearly explained and can be macro'd in various ways." Yeah, but they aren't necessarily as effective by themselves. That is, I know how to use google operators. I find their explanations very simple. I find this page near incomprehensible. And yet I managed to find way way way more mp3s after spending a few minutes slogging through this site than I have in the last X years of using Google.

By: quin

quin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:06:13 -0800

I don't care how good their information is or how wonderful their writing style may be, people who center justify large blocks of text are the enemy.

By: Coventry

Coventry — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:25:09 -0800

Seems to me that G2P pretty much has the MP3 Googling market cornered, though. But the other applications here are interesting.

By: turing_test

turing_test — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:17:49 -0800

cr3ation is also a really nice way to find your mp3's fast. But the information on Fravia's site does go much deeper than media acquisition. But yeah, it can be a pain to wade through.

By: Tacodog

Tacodog — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:24:20 -0800

Metafilter: NOT amazon NOT sex NOT tits NOT win.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:52:11 -0800

My google pre-filter: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 artist.name

By: booksandlibretti

booksandlibretti — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:36:10 -0800

seeqpod works well, in my experience -- along the same lines as cr3ation and g2p, but with a nice interface, and in the searches I've done, seeqpod turned up more hits. If you want to hunt for yourself, the job can be done with intitle:"index.of" (mp3|m4a) title.separated.by.periods -html -htm -asp -cf -jsp

By: Coventry

Coventry — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 06:09:21 -0800

seeqpod has a nice interface, but does it provide an easy way to pull out the URLs or save the audio files to disc? It's not clear to me.

By: vers

vers — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:36:19 -0800

Fravia is a god. That is all.