Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

If you read this blog regularly, you will know that I spout off about using alternative search engines and tools effectively quite a bit.  "We are librarians after all," I often say.  In response to a piece I did a while back on 10 Reason Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google, search engine expert Phil Bradley has written 10 Reasons Why Librarians Should Use Exalead.  Exalead is a long-running alternative search engine with a lot more power and flexibility than your typical Google or Yahoo options.   

Go ahead and read all ten reasons, but the tenth reason, which Phil cites as the most important, is worth quoting here:

10. The advanced search functionality. I’ve left this until last because it’s the most important. You can run phonetic searches, proximity searches, specific language searches (and boy! do these people have a lot of alternatives), a title search, link searches, search by date, a prefix search, site search, exact words or phrases, optional terms, proper Boolean logic with parentheses as well, and regular expressions for things like character repetition, ‘or’ options, single character options and so on. The example they give is /mpg(1|2|3)?/ which is very neat.