Interesting Advanced Search Operators

Live Search (MSN Search) has some interesting operators, not available in Google Search. These operators were introduced last year, but not many people heard about them.

* linkfromdomain restricts your search to sites that are linked from a certain domain. If you don't add keywords after this operator, you can find some of the pages / sites linked from all the pages available on that domain.

linkfromdomain:michellemalkin.com

* linkdomain shows only the pages that link to a page from a certain domain. The link operator from Google shows all the pages that link to the homepage of a site or to a certain page, but you can't see these aggregated results. Linkdomain operator is also available in Yahoo Search.

linkdomain:michellemalkin.com

* contains should be followed by a file extension and is used to restrict the search only to pages that contain links to at least a file that has that extension.

radiohead contains:ogg

* Yahoo has a slightly different operator called feature, useful to show pages that have embedded content. The operator can have one of these values: audio (the page embeds audio files), video (the page embeds video files), javascript (the page has JavaScript code), flash (the page has embedded Flash), frame (the page uses frames), acrobat, applet, activex, form, table.

u2 feature:flash [ Yahoo ]

* prefer lets you give more weight to a keyword.

ipod prefer:review

* loc is used to restrict a search to domains from a certain country.

bistro loc:fr

So if you didn't find a reason to try Live Search or Yahoo Search, these operators might be a good reason.