LL-L "Resources" 2004.01.18 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Heiko Evermann <Heiko.Evermann at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Careers" 2004.01.18 (03) [AE]

Hi everyone,

>It doesn't search for whole phrases, just whether the words you type are on
>the page or not. And it discards very common words. So searching for "The
>dog bit the man" will just search for pages with the words "man", "bit" and
>"dog" - the word order doesn't count.
>
When you put the text in quotation marks, it looks for the exact
sequence. Just give it a try:
enter "of the then" into google and make sure to type in the quotation
marks.
This yields text like
"The contents of the letter of the then Japanese Prime Minister".

Regards,

Heiko

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Resources

Folks,

Gabriele's translation check "trick" and Sandy's and Heiko's input under
"Careers" are great.  I use the "trick" myself, but I do not limit it to
Google (http://www.google.com/).  If Google does not yield what I want I do
not necessarily give up before checking AllThe Web
(http://www.alltheweb.com/), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), Teoma
(http://teoma.com/), Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), Ixquick
(http://www.ixquick.com/) and Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/).  I used to use
AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), do so rarely these days, because I
find it is going downhill.

Here are a couple of additional (?) tips.

(1)
Some search engines allow you to specify languages.  If, for example, you
are trying to check if a phrase you made up in Dutch is correct, you might
want to go to advanced search mode and specify "Dutch."  This will screen
out most pages written in Afrikaans.  This is handy in cases where two or
more languages are very closely related.  There is a possibility that a
sequence that is all right in Afrikaans is incorrect in Dutch.  However, not
all search engines give you Afrikaans as a choice.  Furthermore, some
Afrikaans writers use Dutch software to write text and then paste it into
their web pages.  A search engine may identify such pages as having Dutch
contents.  So, look at the URLs and email addresses of those pages.  If you
see ".za" (South Africa), ".zw" (Zimbabwe) or ".na" (Namibia) you are likely
to be dealing with Afrikaans.  If you see ".an" (Netherlands Antilles),
".be" (Belgium), ".nl" (Netherlands) or ".sr" (Suriname) you are most likely
dealing with Dutch.  (However, there is a fair number of Dutch-writing folks
in South Africa and a fair number of Afrikaans-writing folks in the
Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada and USA.)

(2)
If you are serious about maximizing your pool of language check pages, and
if you are legally old enough and morally braced for it, you had better turn
off the adult contents filter of your search engine.  This means that you
might stumble over a few "naughty" sites.  This is all the more important if
you do not use a language specifier.  Bear in mind that naughty words in one
language may be perfectly fine in other languages.  Thus, content filters
are a bad idea if you are serious about language.  This goes for Lowlands-L
also.  (I sometimes get automatic notification saying that someone's account
has rejected a posting due to adult contents when in reality there was no
such thing.  Very annoying.)

(3) Perform intelligent searches.
(a) Write a sequence in " ".
(b) Use * as a wildcard.
(c) Have anything that must occur be immediately preceded by +.
(d) Have anything you want to exclude from the search be immediately
preceded by -.  (But use this spearingly and only after due consideration,
or else you screen out stuff you really want.)
(e) Make your searches as little specific as possible. Reduce your search to
the barest minimum, excluding names and any combination that you are not
likely to find.

I hope this helped.  I wish you success.

Reinhard/Ron

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