Excluding domains from individual search sets

DEVONagent Tips
1

Is there a way to exclude particular domains from individual search sets? (I don’t want to have an overall exclusion, which I know is possible in the general preferences setting.)

(The reason for this: I have a search set up to run daily, using a slightly tweaked Internet search. It brings in all the new entries from the main blogs in this field - but I don’t need these from DevonAgent because I already have RSS feeds for these blogs. So if I could just exclude these blogs from the search set then scanning the daily results would be a lot easier.)

-Mark

2

That’s not (yet) possible but you might use a secondary query, e.g. add “NOT (<name/URL of blog1> OR <name/URL of blog2> OR …)” (without quotes) to the primary query.

3

-M.

4

Originally I thought this should do the trick, but having thought about this for a couple of minutes, I think the problem would be that it will also exclude articles quoting or linking to these blogs rather than just the blogs themselves, n’est-ce-pas?

-M.

5

You’re “unfortunately” right. But a future release might add exclusion of domains to search sets.

6

It’s been over a year from this posting, and I would like to know if the answer is still the same…

What I specifically want is to exclude specific domains from being searched at all. It just happens that in the technology sector, where all my searches take place, there are sites like TechRepublic, BitPipe, some ZDNet domains, and others that are just large collections of vendor white papers, and require subscription; unfortunately they then use those subscription to mercilessly spam users. Even more unfortunate, these sites add massive number of keywords to their pages, making them look as otherwise attractive target pages; it’s not unusual to have thousands of presumed hits from them, each one of them an invitation to subscribe to get to the content.

Sorry about the long description, I just wanted to qualify my question appropriately: I do not want ANY pages in domains containing a certain text token to be retrieved. Is that possible? Is it possible to maintain a log list of such sites (between ten and fifty)? I want to be able to keep those lists of domains PER SEARCH, not for the whole program (as in Preferences)

7

You can exclude domains via the preferences of course but these settings are applied to all searches and are not specific to certain search sets.