Many Web users are becoming familiar with search engines such as Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot and Yahoo.

Alta Vista in particular permits further restricting the area of a search by limiting its search for keywords to special areas of an HTML document. Entering (in the search box) a constraining (location) keyword, followed by a colon and then the actual (search) keywords for which you are looking causes Alta Vista to return hits only when the "search" words are found in the "location" word part of the document. Use the syntax locationword:searchword.

The restricting location keywords are:

anchor	looks for text "anchored" in a hypertext link (<A HREF>xxxxx</A>)
applet	looks for the name of a Java applet class in an applet tag
host	looks in the name of the hosting Web server, such as "www.stlcc.cc.mo.us"
image	looks for images in supported formats by name (flag2.gif, backgrd4.jpg)
link	looks for particular URL links, such as "http://www.stlcc.cc.mo.us/fp/users/dlandiss/"
text	looks only in the text area (body) of the document
title	yep! looks only in the title (<TITLE>xxxxx</TITLE>)
url	of course! looks only in the document's URL for keywords

For example, to find out how many sites contain links to your Web site, visit Alta Vista and enter the following search instructions on the Simple Query page:

No frames! No CGI! No Java! No Active-X! Help stamp out 8-bit color!

Address comments and ideas to dan@landiss.com
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