Factored searches / search strategies?

[Jay_Levitt]

Whenever I’m Googling something, I end up refining the query to pick up synonyms and filter out spam, aggregators and shopping sites. At this point, I have a reasonably stable search strategy for my common queries.

For example, when I’m looking for Snow Leopard-related info, I filter out the pre-release speculation by searching for:

("snow leopard" OR "10.6") -"road to" -"beta" -"seeds" -"release" -2008 -2007 -2006

I can use LaunchBar or keyword-based bookmarks to do this. But I can’t combine search strategies that way; if I have a strategy for “photoshop”, I can’t search for:

"snow leopard" AND photoshop

I want some kind of front-end flattener tool that reduces my strategies to their fully-factored equivalents.

DEVONagent seems like the kind of tool that might do this, and I already own it - but I can’t see any functionality that’s particularly well-suited to it. Is there a way to do this? Or has anybody seen another tool that does what I want?

[cgrunenberg]

@Jay Levitt

Whenever I’m Googling something, I end up refining the query to pick up synonyms and filter out spam, aggregators and shopping sites. At this point, I have a reasonably stable search strategy for my common queries.

You could create a dedicated search set (e.g. by duplicating the “Internet (Fast Scan)” default set) and then at least exclude the spam/aggregator/shopping sites via the secondary search term. In addition, you can exclude sites via Preferences > Search.