Tool Alert: OneSearch.com

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Hello Sourcers:

A brand-new “privacy-first” web search engine OneSearch.com from Verizon is out.

Unlike Google, Bing, or Yandex, OneSearch does not have its own index. The search results are Bing-based.

There is no documentation on search operators, but it looks like the operator site: works, and so do a few more, including the Bing-only operator, contains:, which looks for pages with links to files of specific formats. Oddly, as Balazs has pointed out, OneSearch has trouble understanding NOT. I hope we’ll collectively solve that mystery!

The “privacy” aspect can be improved, as some critics say. What is of interest to us though, is that private search engines like OneSearch and DuckDuckGo are not putting users in a “filter bubble.” We can use them to widen our searches.

Web search has a drop-down of the page age restrictions; we can set different time intervals by manipulating the search URL (for example, replace &age=1m with &age=1y). I don’t know if it’s possible to restrict to a language or locality.

OneSearch has a nice set of image search options.

I have found it slightly annoying that OneSearch doesn’t consistently show and highlight keywords in the results. It could be Bing’s quality too; I do not use Bing that often and will need to run some tests. On the positive side, it seems much faster than Bing itself.

Please share your OneSearch observations in the comments or on our

Boolean Strings Facebook Group.

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