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here’s a great piece contributed by a very talented research professional named shally steckerl (who just got married) - he has graciously allowed me to repost this original article for all of you folks in the passingnotes community who are interested in an alternative to elGoog…read the whole thing and you’ll learn about nearly a buncha new ways to search via MSN with le mot juste - in ways that elGoog can not touch…
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MSN Search - field commands
Cool field search commands with MSN Search (Beta)

MSN is making its move on the search wars. I am here to tell you today that no matter who wins each battle in this war, the real winners are recruiters. Though the MSN index is still immature and at about 5 billion pages it isn’t nearly the size of Yahoo’s Inktomi index or Google’s massive 8 billion page database, and lacks the depth of AllTheWeb, gone are the days of vastly overlapping results. With each one of these monsters of search competing against each other and crawling independently from each other, it is becoming more and more important for real seekers to use all three in order to find those valuable clusters of data buried in deep corners of the web.

Today I’m going to give you a glimpse of MSN Search so you can play with it and add it to your arsenal.

The first three commands I want to share with you are the cool new fuzzy search results ranking commands. These commands are used by adding round numbers from 0 to 100 and must be encapsulated in {brackets}. They work by allowing you to manipulate which search results you see ranked first. You can use all three together in any search to modify your rankings.

mtch=

The Match command. This allows you to decide how precise you want the first search results to be. The closer you get to zero (o) more “exact matches” will be ranked first. Approaching one hundred (100) means your results will be more approximate, allowing the following two commands to determine results ranking. Exact matches are better for finding unique terminology, while the approximate matches will allow for a more loose interpretation of your search terms. Use it like this: {mtch=20}

popl=

The Popularity command. This allows you to rank results by how many other sites link to that site. Remember that most of the real nuggets of information are hidden in sites which are not popular and may have few, if any, other sites linking to them. The range begins at zero (0) for the least popular sites and ends at one hundred (100) for the most popular. Use it like this: {popl=0}

frsh=

The Freshness command. This allows you to modify your search results emphasizing site more recently added to the index. Fresh and new sites are not necessarily more likely to contain relevant candidate information, but they will point to people who have recently changed jobs or achieved notoriety. Keep in mind that blogs, journals, news related sites, and any website with dynamic content (like our own ERExchange.com) will always show up as fresh since their “last edited date” will always be “today’s date.” A freshness of one hundred (100) ranks the most recently updated sites first, ranging to zero (0) for those least recently updated. Use it like this: {frsh=90}

loc:

MSN Search introduces a Location command allowing for somewhat geographic results. A search using the field command loc:GB will attempt to limit results to UK based sites.

language:

The ability to focus on results from only one language can come in very handy. To limit your search only to results in English use language:en.

Many of the other commands with which you are already familiar are supported. The site: command allows you to narrow down a search for results within a particular URL, or of course also eliminate any results from said URL.

As a bonus, the link: command, which on MSN can be used in conjunction with other field search commands, will return results of pages linking to a particular URL.

Let me bring it all together for you. Say you wanted to find information about candidates who have recently written about PHP over linux, in English, on their own webpage, but not on a blog or news source, and who link to sourceforge.org. You could use something like this:

{mtch=20} {popl=0} {frsh=90} PHP linux link:sourceforge.org -site:sourceforge.org language:en -blog -news

The search returns about 130 results, many of which are programmer’s home pages which is a decent starting point. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, unlike Google MSN Search doesn’t limit you to ten keywords so you can build your queries as complex as you want them.

In case you are wondering what the “Near Me” button is for, what that does is bring back results that are geographically located near you - or about your location. It tends to define your location rather broadly so that New York also includes Long Island. Location is determined by one of four ways: your IP address, your preferences (settings), your search terms (i.e. Atlanta, GA) or by selecting from the “Try near” picklist in the search results. Its not nearly as good as local.google.com yet, or even local.yahoo.com, but its getting there quickly.

Stay tuned as the Pro version of my Recruiters’ CheatSheet will delve deeper into how to use the above commands for finding candidate information on the Internet.

About the Author: Shally Steckerl, Recruitment Consultant and Founder www.jobmachine.net
Shally is a talent acquisition strategy expert, contract recruiter, researcher and consultant. Currently Shally serves in the Talent Acquisition department of Google. Previously, Shally has recruited for such leading companies as Coca-Cola, Cisco Systems, and Motorola among others. Shally has developed a reputation over the years as an authority in Internet search, a pioneer in recruitment intelligence, an accomplished trainer and author. Shally is founder of the acclaimed www.jobmachine.net portal.

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