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Search Engines

Jump to specialist searches

Search the new whtech url using Google:
Note: The website at myzen.co.uk closed at the end of October 2023. The website is now at t http://ftp.whtech.com/Users/stephen/index.htm, but it may not appear on searches for some time. THIS form searches whtech content and may take a month or so before the content is available. Google suggest it can take 12 months to index a website... Bing seems to do better.
      

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Finding information on the Internet is becoming very difficult. Please do try the following search engines.

When researching on the internet, try not to limit yourself to one search engine. None of them are even close to perfect, and even using them all you may not find the website with the information you need. It does not mean there is none. There are very few useable search engines left. I will not use any that insist on javascript. Search engines regularly modify their algorithms to reduce hijacked results (sometimes works, sometimes makes things worse!) so your favourite today could serve you junk tomorrow (and be back to best next month). The current crop of websites go out of their way NOT to be indexed...
The various search tools have differing sets of web pages and differing algorithms. For difficult subjects it is usually best to use two or three search engines at least.
I have found it advantageous to try some of the other search engines below.

Frog Find
This is a very simple unsophisticated search with one page of results, courtesy of Frogfind.com - but if you click a result, it will try to show you the site as text - no images, no forms, no script. Functions to simplify rubbish websites and also gets around elliptical curve. Does NOT allow access to really rubbish websites with scripted content loading etc (hello BBC...) with nothing but megabytes of script or css. Don't forget: NO forms. Try this one- I use it for some news sites...
FrogFind! Leap again:
One Search This is now my most used search engine. It is a Bing scraper. Not biased by prior searches. No deluge of sponsored links. Few utterly irrelevant links. This form uses moderate safe search. I have to turn off CSS to select search period. Good image search.
Search query:
NOTE: Onesearch is BUGGY - if there are any problems at all, it just says there are no results - generally if you refresh such a page several times the results will show up.

The source of onesearch searches is Bing (Without script, it offers me no date filter, no image access!!):

DuckDuckGo
Duckduckgo may serve a very large number of irrelevant pages (sadly they retain the enormous Ggle spam content) and omits the obvious ones- now often MORE than Google. Duckduckgo now allows a date filter. No image search works for me. I'd like to place them higher, but they are poor at finding the pages I want.

Use Google.com
The option "verbatim" stops Google second guessing you and searching on Glass when you wish to search on Lass- but it is a choice, either verbatim OR selected time period- not both together. Verbatim will ignore prior search bias, and also avoid synonyms. Some people may need to turn verbatim off. Watch for the sponsored pages at the top.
NOTE: Google now pushes contentless and spammy big websites but will hide small private websites with lots of content. Chances of finding what you are looking for with google are falling fast. They also throw in random impossible captchas insisting you are not human.
About Google Verbatim
The Others
Qwant appears to be an independant and often finds what I want- it also accepts the site:myurl.com input. Alas, full of Spam/AI trash. May be more dated content. Excellent image search. This form is to the "lite Qwant" version:

Mojeek- like Google- can sometimes be unduly defensive and rarely finds what I am looking for!
Search mojeek:

Specialist Searches

Search text in Gutenberg books Search on the first 100k or so of the text in books held by Project Gutenberg using this subset from Google:
Google Full Text (enter phrases "in quotes"):

Archive.org IMPORTANT: archive.org has continued its move to only work with "modern browsers". Finding a document or media on archive.org is very difficult to impossible. There is another way- a very small 31k script written in awk, which you can access online. If you want you can paste the script onto your own computer and run it as a tiny dedicated web server. But online is available and faster for me, so here is a search for archive.org- put as many terms in as you wish eg "hancock's half hour" or "bbc radio drama" or "angus macvicar".

[This search at present uses http, https is available if you want and your browser supports elliptical curve. This search works with all scripts forbidden in your browser settings. NOTE: This search ignores the web archive eg no saved web pages].

Search Archive.org:

Wikipedia This is a search box for wikipedia that does not require scripts, courtesy of theoldnet.com. You will get a page of links and choose one to go to the wikipedia page. No elliptical curve https required. Links outside wikipedia will not function.

Infogalactic
Infogalactic is a fork of wikipedia, with much of the same data but mostly only up to 2015 or 2016 although newer articles are imported. Inforgalactic serves pages happily to my old browser unlike that other website. Two buttons below- the GO button will only go to a page with a matching title, whereas the SEARCH button looks for the text on a page.
   

Search BBC Program Index
Search BBC Genome:
Scroll down the resulting page to see the results at the end.

Tidy youtube search At present Youtube is very hostile to who it serves its pages to, refusing old browsers and requiring scripting enabled. Here is a rather simpler search you can use, using "Invideous" coding. Type the video you are looking for in the input box below the word "INVIDEOUS" when the page comes up.
Easy to select date period, length and so on. NB: Results use elliptical curve. When you have selected your video there is even a DOWNLOAD button to use....select 360p or 720p as you prefer.
In line with recent news stories (2023) youtube is making life very difficult for alternative sources, and this service may fail for periods due to youtube "defensive" actions.
     1. If you have the youtube reference key it in here and go straight to the video:
or 2. Search the youtube database NB due to some incompatabilities in data format this search MAY fail with some searches. Try something slightly different if that happens. The failure is due to the format of the search result returned by youtube.

  The list of current invideous instances: Invideous list

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