Yahoo! Hacks

Assemble Advanced Search Queries

By understanding how Yahoo! Advanced Search URLs are structured, you can create your own Advanced Search queries on the fly.

In addition to the simple search form you’ll find at http://search.yahoo.com, Yahoo! offers an Advanced Web Search form at http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced. This form lets you refine your search in a number of ways, so you can narrow the results to a more useful list.

For example, if you’d like to find information about a generic topic, such as astronomy, you could go to Yahoo!, type astronomy into the search form, and find hundreds of sites related to the word. But if you want only a segment of those results, you can browse over to the Advanced Web Search form, type astronomy, and limit the results by top-level domain, as shown in Figure 1-9.

Figure 1-9. Yahoo! Advanced Search form

A search for astronomy across .gov sites returns only pages at NASA’s web site. The same search limited to .edu sites results in astronomy programs at various universities, and limiting to .com gives you astronomy magazines at the top of the results.

You can further refine your search by limiting it to a specific file format, such as PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, or XML files. For any given search, you can also override your global preferences settings for language, number of results, and adult content filtering.

Anatomy of an Advanced Search URL ...