Fast search

You can find it at http://www.alltheweb.com.

They’re ambitious; I’ll give them that. This site aims to index the entire web and it has already passed the 600 million pages mark. It also claims to be very fast (and, I must admit, it does seem quite swift). FAST Search powers some of the results at Lycos.

Fast Search searches web pages, MP3 files, pictures, videos and FTP files.

Using the basic search

Enter you search terms and click the Search button. If you want to search for an exact phrase, check the Exact phrase box. You can also select a language from the drop down list.

If you want to be a bit cleverer, you can:

To include a word put a "+" sign in front of it. Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign. The one exception to this is "the", which is so common it is not considered in searches
To exclude a word put a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to avoid. Be sure to include a space before the minus sign
To search for complete phrases, put them in double quotation marks
Put the words in brackets to make the results contain one or more of the words. It is an OR search really

The results page

Here is an example results entry:

Each results shows the title of the page, a description of the page and the url. Fast Search only returns one page from a site.

You might see a search tip box on the right of the page. The tip is relevant to your search. You might also get a box telling you how many multimedia results apply to your search.

Using the advance search

You can:

Search on all words, any of the words or for an exact phrase. Select your option from the drop-down list on the Advanced Search page
Select a language
Include or exclude certain words or phrases. This apply the restrictions to the text of the page, the title of the page, any links on the page
Search only a specific website or exclude that site completely from your search
Exclude adult sites and content from the search results

Special features

You can use special keywords in your search, e.g. to find pages within a specified domain, or pages with a certain word in its title or URL. Currently you can use the following keywords:

Keyword	Function
url.tld:domainname	Finds pages within the specified domain. For example, url.tld:com will find pages from commercial sites.
url.host:name	Finds pages on a specific site. url.host:www.aniteps.com will find pages on the the Anite Public Sector site.
link.all:URLtext	Finds pages with a link to a page with the specified URL text. link.all:www.bbc.co,uk will find all pages linking to www.bbc.co.uk
normal.title:text	Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). title:rugby will find pages with rugby in the title.
url.all:text	Finds pages with the specific word or phrase in the URL. url:rugby will find all pages on all servers that have the word football anywhere in the full URL.
normal.titlehead:text	Finds pages with the specified word or phrase in the title or in the header.
url.domain:text	Finds pages with the specified word or phrase anywhere in the domain name.
link.extension:text	link.extension:jpg will find pages that contain .jpg images.

You may combine any of the keywords in a search, separated by white-space.

Customising the search

Fast search enables you to save certain search preferences. Select the Customise link from the search box. For example, you can:

Exclude adult sites and content from the search results
Choose what type of search you want to do as a default, for example, web pages, pictures, MP3 files etc
Choose whether to display search tips
Restrict your searches to pages in the languages that you choose