Bing’s Buffet of Special Syntax, Research Buzz ( June 30)
Bing has a guide to its search syntax. This was prepared for programmers using APIs to create applications, but searchers can avail themselves of it too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx
Two key documents
+ Operator Precedence - Bing is the only engine to still supports full boolean operators - AND, OR, NOT. Use them in the correct order. Of interest -- foo bar OR bing yahoo is handled as foo AND bar OR bing AND yahoo, You might not want that. Use parenthesis to say what you do want.
+ Advanced Operator Reference - many prefixes are available - right down to searching a meta tag.
There is a near operator -- "Constrains the distance between terms so that documents that contain instances of the specified terms within ten words of each other are returned before those that don’t."
format is near:n -- example dolostone near:10 bruce - to find page where dolostone and bruce are up to 10 words apart. The number can be adjusted up or down - which way depends on how you think the words might be spaced in a document. This does not replace the simple keyword search where the search engine can go to work with it relevancy ranking. But there may be occasions where you will want to do more selective followup queries looking for proximity.
Posted by Gwen at July 6, 2010 02:40 PM