Internet Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Going Online

YAHOO!

FANCY SEARCHING WITH YAHOO!

The Annoyance:

Google, Google, Google! All I ever hear about are fancy tips for finding things with Google. But I'm a big Yahoo! fan, and I want Yahoo! to do those things, too. Isn't there some way to teach my favorite site new tricks?

The Fix:

Yahoo! doesn't have quite as many fancy features as Google, but a few cool tools are buried deep in the system. For example, you can fine-tune your searches in several ways. If you want to search for pages on only a specific domain (and its subdomains), use the site: syntax. For example, to search for Hvorostovsky on the Metropolitan Opera site at www.metopera.org, you'd enter Hvorostovsky site: www.metopera.org.

Here are a few more bits of useful Yahoo! search syntax:

link:

Find documents that link to a specific URL. For example, link:http://www.windowsdevcenter.com.

inurl:

Search for pages whose URLs contain a specific word. For example, inurl:gralla.

intitle:

Search for pages whose titles contain a specific word. For example, intitle:gralla.

CUT DOWN ON YAHOO! NAVIGATION

The Annoyance:

Yahoo! has lots of special sections devoted to sports, finance, weather, and so on, which I love. But it takes forever to get to them. How can I jump quickly to these pages?

The Fix:

Use the ! operator to jump straight to where you want to go. For example, if you're on Yahoo! and you want to get to Yahoo! Sports, type sports! in the search box and you'll be sent there immediately. For a full list of other places you can go to in this way, head to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-06.html.