Sometimes when I search on a website I try to select a search term that includes inflections. Say I’m looking for the terms replace or replacing on the website. For that I would have to enter replac in the search form so that both terms are found on the page. Another example is the search term use which would reveal not only all instances of use on the page but also used, user and using.

With the Chrome extension, you can enter one term and find all occurrences of all matching terms highlighted on the page.

You bring up the advanced search form after installation by either pressing F2 once of the f-key twice in rapid succession.

The extension highlights all occurrences on the page. If you add more than one search term you will notice that each is colored differently. That’s interesting as it allows you to run multiple searches at once on a page.

The program found all occurrences of use and printing on the page. It will furthermore highlight the total result count in the search form. You can use the up and down arrow buttons to scroll to the next or previous occurrence of a search result on the active web page.

The inflection detection works both ways. You can enter use to find using or user, or enter using to find user or use as well on the page.

Advanced Search on Page is a handy Chrome extension for users who want to find related phrases on a website during searches. The free Chrome extension can be installed at the official Chrome Web Store.

So how can you search a website by date and time if the website itself is not offering that functionality? Easy, you use a search engine like Google (I’d say Bing as well but Bing does not offer date and time filters currently). Lets take a look at the default search results first on the userscripts.org website.

The top five lists one result from 2010, three from 2009 and one from 2006 of which all are not working anymore. Lets take a look at the advanced site search on Google for the same search.

The Google search shows the most recent hits on userscripts.org for the specified search term. How was it done? Lets take a closer look at the search phrase:

site:userscripts.org keyword

This is the basic search phrase. The site: command followed by a web address tells Google that you only want to search that site, the keyword can consist of one or multiple terms. You can use boolean parameters like AND, OR as well in the query. If you would search for this Google would display similar results to those on the original website. To sort by date and time use the sidebar and switch from any time to another option, for instance past month. Please note that the search results are not sorted chronologically. Google places the most relevant result at the top. But since you have selected a different time range you can be sure that you only see results that have been created during that time frame. Users who want to see results from a specific day or custom time range can use the custom range option to filter the results.

The advanced search parameter can be helpful in numerous occasions. It can for instance be used if a site does not offer a search at all, or if the search is limited in functionality, for instance if there is no option to sort the results by date or time.

The time based search option for example is an exact replica of the feature found in the advanced options. It lets a user narrow down search results by time. The remaining options on the other hand are not the same and can change Google search drastically. The first filter makes it possible to narrow down the search results by type. It is possible to only display videos, forums or reviews.

Selecting a filter will limit the available filters in the other categories. This is however a great way of finding video, forum or review resources in Google. The forum and review filter seems to have the occasional unrelated entry (e.g. a non-forum link in the forum filter) though.

Probably even more interesting is the option to display more text and or images from the pages in the search results. The first option will expand the space of every search result in Google and fill it with additional text from that website. The second will display thumbnail images of images found on these pages. It is only possible to select one filter at a time but they do change the way the search results are presented dramatically.

Lastly there is an option to display related searches, a wonder wheel or a timeline which are also displayed on top or on the left of the search results page.

These filters will remain active all the time until the user changes them again or leaves the Google page. Google managed to add some interesting search options to their search engine which help filter and expand the search results effectively.