AlltheWeb with more neat search engine tricks

(May 16 2003) There were those who were afraid the Overture take over would lead to less emphasis on innovation in the AlltheWeb search engine team.

It didn't. Which makes sense, given that Overture needs a high quality search engine if it is to win the battle with Google.

Clustering of results

Resourceshelf reports that Alltheweb will now organize results into "clusters" at the end of the results list.

A click on one of the cluster listings will bring up a new result page with a relevant extract from the original search results. The query itself will not be changed.

Limit searches to one database

Moreover, you may now use any AlltheWeb search form to search any of the AlltheWeb databases by using a special search syntax:

• The image database: pics: or images: or image:
• The news database: news:
• The regular Web search engine: web:
• The video database: video: or videos:
• The ftp database: ftp:
• The audio database: mp3: or audio:

To search for news on Iraq, you enter the following search query:

news: iraq

Using AlltheWeb as a conversion calculator

AlltheWeb has already turned the search field into a regular calculator. Now you may also use it as a conversion calculator.

AlltheWeb will convert any of the known units of measure into both Imperial (inches, feet, yards, miles, nautical miles) and Metric units (centimeters, meters, kilometers).

In order to convert 4 inches into centimeters or meters, you write the following in the search field:

convert: 4 in

You may also spell out the measure, like this covert: 4 inch or convert: 4 inches

Whether you will put spaces after the colon and the numbers is up to you.

The abbreviations used are: cm, m, km, in, ft, yd, mi, nm.

You may perform a similar operation for converting time, speed, weight, area and cooking volume. hence covert: 1 cup, gives the following result (with no less than six decimal points, mind you!):

Metric

• 236.518538 ml
• 2.365185 dl
• 0.236519 l

Imperial

• 3,646.925096 drop
• 767.773747 dash
• 383.886874 pinch
• 48.000000 tsp
• 51.186353 tspuk
• 16.000000 tbsp
• 12.796588 tbspuk
• 8.000000 floz
• 8.324285 flozuk
• 0.500000 pt
• 0.416214 ptuk
• 0.250000 qt
• 0.062500 gal
• 0.052027 galuk

And yes, the abbreviations are explained on the result page.

See AlltheWeb's help page for more details.

Using AlltheWeb as a regular calculator

As reported earlier, you may also use the AlltheWeb search form as a regular calculator.

Enter, for instance, 365*24, hit enter, and AlltheWeb gives you the answer (8760).

The following functions are supported:

• Multiply: *
• Divide: /
• Add: +
• Subtract: -
• Exponent: ^

Use parentheses to group operations: (5+5)*6

See also our article: New year innovations from Fast AlltheWeb for more advanced search features.

The Pandia AlltheWeb Q-card presents the regular search syntax.

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