How to source “Old School” style with Excite

Posted by Jim Stroud

May 18, 2007

I was feeling nostalgic the other day and remininscing about some resources and techniques that I used back in the day. (For those who don’t know, I’ve been an internet researcher since 1997.) Its funny, some search engines that I "grew up" on, I have not used for years. Take HotBot for example, its not its own engine anymore. When you use it to search the internet, you are actually using the LIVE search engine or the ASK search engine. (Big whoop -I may as well go those search engines directly.)

Still walking down memory lane, I hop over to another search engine from way back when - EXCITE. Like HotBot it gives me the results of other search engines, but unlike HotBot, it did produce some results of its own. Let me show you what I mean.

This is the homepage of the EXCITE search engine. As you can see, its a bit over-crowded (in my opinion) with content and excessive links.

Excite homepage

With HotBot, I noticed a few search operators worked like "intitle," "inurl," "AND," "NOT," and "OR." So, I experimented using a really wide search string. Here it is…

(objective OR summary) AND education AND ("C#" OR "C Sharp") AND "computer science" "software developer"

And these are the results…

There are 26 results in all and while the amount of results may be underwhelming, let me tell you that you are actually reviewing data from different search engines and (carefully woven in the same results are ads disguised as search results- double yuck). I prefer to know which results are from search engines, which results are unique to Excite and which are ads. Fortunately, I figured out a way to do just that. Simply click on the "Preferences" link beneath the search box and to the right of the "Advanced Web Search" link. (As shown by the arrow below)

Jim Stroud trains sourcers

This will take you to the following page (below).

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the "Results Display" section and choose the "Search Engine" radio button under "Web."

Excite

Once I set that preference (choosing the "Search Engine" radio button I mean), I scroll to the absolute bottom of that page and click "Save Settings." I then repeat my search and notice right away that the results are segmented by the search engine it extracted the results from.

Like the following results from Yahoo…

I train sourcers

And the following results from Google.

But there is also a section of "Internet Finds" which seem to be unique to Excite.

At this writing, there were no ads associated with this search string. If there were, there would be a section for those as well. Just fyi…

So what’s the verdict? Will I return Excite back into my bag of tricks? Umm… probably not. I get better results going to the oher search engines directly. Still I did find a few (very few) results I had not seen before; so maybe after I have exhausted everything else. I guess its true when they say that you could never go home again. Oh well…

Happy Hunting!

-Jim

ADV: If you like this kind of thing, check out my training video: How to automate (some of) the sourcing process!