A Better Way to Search Journals

Hi folks -- so, last week I was talking with Journals Product Manger Susan about the state of AOL Journals Search.

Now, I'm not a big fan of the current Journals/Hometown search -- it works okay if you're searching for a Journal by a specific screen name (I do this a lot, since a lot of silly people write me without giving their blog's address), but it's pretty hit or miss when it comes to keyword searches.

The Journals team is looking at a couple of different options for replacing the current Journals search with something better in the near- to mid-term, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's a way to get a much better Journals search experience -- which even includes a better way to search the content of your own Journal.

In case you'd forgotten, AOL Search is powered by Google, so what I'm going to show you works for the regular Google search, though because I'm a loyal company man, I am going to use AOL Search as my example.

All you have to do is use the AOL Search Advanced Search form:

We do a pretty good job of hiding it, don't you think? The direct URL is http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/advanced

When you go to that address, you will see the Advanced Search form (excerpted below):

Advanced Search gives you a bunch of options to narrow and filter your Search results. (If you know the search syntax, you can do all of these by typing commands into the search box, but we'll get to that later.)

What we're interested in is at the very bottom, which I circled in red: The item that says "ONLY for this domain:"

This field lets you restrict your search results to a specific Web address, or a portion of a Web address. This is very,very useful.

For example, say I want to search only AOL Journals. In that case, I would type my search term (say, cow-orker), then type journals.aol.com into the box next to "ONLY for this domain:",  since journals.aol.com is part of every AOL Journals address. Here are the results for that search.

But wait, there's more!

Say I want to search only my own AOL Journals. Assuming I have a few Journals under my screen name, I would type the portion of the Web address that includes my screen name, journals.aol.com/journalseditor (check out the results).

I can go farther... if I want to search only one Journal, I would just have to type the rest of the Journal's address -- in my case, it would be journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke (here are the results, though they're the same as before in this example.)

So, in the picture above (see the parts circled in red), I am searching for the word cow-orker only in Web sites that have journals.aol.com/journalseditor in their address.

Here are the search results for that query, so you can see it works.

(If you like, you can skip the form entirely; the advanced search syntax for the site-restricted search is:

site:journals.aol.com/journalseditor cow-orker

If you paste that into the AOL Search box, you will get the same thing as using the Advanced Search form (note there's no space between the site: and the address); a search on the term cow-orker, restricted to Web sites with journals.aol.com/journalseditor in the address.)

You can also bookmark the search in your Favorite Places, or keep it as one of your Saved Searches, so you can quickly access it instead of retyping everything.

Anyway, you can play around with the search and the search URLs and see how you like it. It's very handy if you're looking for something on a specific Web site; I use it all the time.

Don't forget, you can find out what's going on with AOL Search in their official blog, All About AOL Search.

Thanks -- Joe

[Update: Okay, I was trying to get too cute with cow-orker, since that search as shown also pulls up co-worker and coworker -- it's ignoring the dash. If you want to search only on cow-orker, enclose it in quotes: "cow-orker" -- Joe]