MSN Search Adds Special Syntax

Whee! I love special syntax. MSN has added several to their Web search. You can get a full explanation at http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/06/24/432439.aspx, but in the meantime here's a rundown:

Filetype: Searches for documents of a particular filetype. At the moment it supports html, txt, pdf, doc, rtf, xls, and ppt. Strangely enough running fred filetype:htm and fred filetype:html gets the same list of results but different search result numbers. Note that you can use filetype: without using a keyword. Searching for filetype:html gives Google as the first result. Snicker. Speaking of Google, MSN's filetype search is not as flexible as Google's; Google's can be used to search for any kind of filetype, including the elusive "whee" filetype (Google filetype:whee inurl:whee).

Link: and Linkdomain: MSN already had link:, which finds pages that link to a specific page, but they've added linkdomain:, which allows you to find pages which link to a specific domain. Note that you can "mix" this syntax with another, useful for Webmasters who want to see what kinds of sites are linking to theirs (MSN linkdomain:researchbuzz.com site:edu ).

Contains: -- As the blog entry explains it, "searches for pages where there’s a hyperlink to a file with the extension ." So you can search for links to media which MSN search may not yet index. Here's an old-school example: "all your base" contains:swf .

inurl: / inanchor: / intitle: / inbody: -- Much like the Google operators. Notice there is no allinurl: or allintitle: option, thank goodness. (I think those options are too easy to screw up.) There are some issues with these syntax at the moment, see the blog entry for more information.

I started wondering if there was a query word limit for MSN. Searching for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten finds just over 1.8 million results, while searching for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven finds zippo. I guess there's a ten word limit, but I wish it wasn't quite so abrupt! (By comparison a Google search for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven finds something over 1.7 million results.)

Posted to Search Engines-MSN | TrackBack