[Search-l] (no subject)

[Stephen Carr]

Hi all, 

 

OK, sorted my problem with replies to threads so any replies to this should
be OK

 

Below was peter burden’s reply to my cries, Peter yes I am talking about
searching for a domain names but in conjunction with normal search criteria
not instead, my “wildcard domain filter” is in addition to the normal search
criteria 

 

Again I will give a demonstration of when I wanted to use it

 

I saw a website whilst driving, when I got home I remembered the first few
chars and that it was a .com, I also remembered what the advert was about
but I could not find it using Google as it returned too many results, this
is because when you use INURL it looks in the whole URL not just the TLD
(top level domain) name and it does not give any precedence to order, so if
you type INURL:CH INURL:TH INURL:.COM these search phrases can appear in any
order and in the whole URL including all sub pages. So it would return this
as a good result

 

HYPERLINK
"http://www.a-wrong.page.com/this/is/not/a/chruch.com"www.a-wrong.page.com/t
his/is/not/a/chruch.com

 

Whereas using this criteria HYPERLINK "http://www.ch*th.com/"www.ch*th.com
would not, it would only bring back domains that start in HYPERLINK
"http://www.ch/"www.ch have anything else in middle and end in .com,
probably reducing the amount of results by a very large amount

 

Peter also says there are 150,000,000 domain names and that normal SE’s look
at content not TLD names, too search domain names would take too long, I
don’t really get that argument if there are 150,000,000 and normal SE’s
search the content then surely the content of 150,000,000 websites is a lot
more to search than 150,000,000 domain name that are limited in length to
mane them readable and a naming convention!

 

Well I hope someone can explain why having this wildcard searching of TLD’s
in a search engine in conjunction with normal search criteria will not work
or is a bad idea, I am sure we have ALL forgotten a website name after
seeing it somewhere and I’m sure we all have wanted to simply type something
like “HYPERLINK "http://www.forgotenname*.com/"www.forgotenname*.com kids
names” as a search in Google, I have and I cannot be alone! Can I?

 

Cya.

 

Steve

 

On 10/01/2008, Stephen Carr <HYPERLINK
"http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l"stephencarr at
blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>  Hi again,
> 
> 
> 
> Well I'm still not sure how to reply to a thread so here I have cut and
paste one reply to my request with my answers, I still have not seen a good
reason for not having a DOMAIN name (NOT URL) wildcard search (along with
extra search words if possible) is this really that bad an idea? Am I the
only one that thinks wildcards will be a GREAT help finding what your
looking is some instances?
> 
> 
> 
> Forget all the techno jargon, all you need do if the user types
www.help*.com is first return a list of ONLY those top level domains that do
not fit this criteria then continue and apply any standard search parameter!
> 
> 
You are talking about a searching for a domain name. Search engines do not
(normally)
build and maintain searchable lists of domain names, they build and maintain
searchable
indexes of document content. I don't think any SE operator has felt the need
to provide
domain searching, you could try the search facilities that many domain
registration sites
offer, but I don't recall seeing one that offers anything other than exact
matching or possibly
looking in a limited set of TLDs.
 
Netcraft are currently reporting some 150 million domain names. I don't know
of any
way of organising such a list for efficient (meaning 100's comparisons at
most) searching
using regular expression (or wildcard) matching. Maybe somebody does.
 
[Searching for an exact match is a different matter, there are many
techniques that
can reduce the computational load to 100's or fewer comparisons.]
 
I've sometimes thought that regular expression matching would be a nice
advanced
search feature but the efficiency problems are so horrendous that I've never
seen any
SE offer such a feature - not since about 1995 anyway

 


No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.2/1223 - Release Date: 13/01/2008
20:23
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikia.com/pipermail/search-l/attachments/20080114/04550918/attachment.html