Microsoft’s confusing search macros
There’s plainly a great idea hiding in Microsoft’s search macros, but boy, have they hid it behind some confusing text. For instance:
2. Make a macro
Next is the macro creation screen. Macros have several components: a name, the default scope (Web results vs. News results), a description and a definition. The definition is where you define the advanced operators for your macro. For example, livesearch.recipes that we’ve been talking about has the following definition:
(-site:toeatgoodfood.com -linkdomain:googlesyndication.com intitle:recipe prefer:cup prefer:serve prefer:cook prefer:food prefer:menu prefer:cookbook prefer:site:www.epicurious.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com prefer:site:allrecipes.com prefer:site:www.foodtv.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com)
It uses the following operators to find good recipe sites:
site: restrict results to a single domain
prefer: reorder the results preferring this term
linkdomain: finds results that link to a page on a domain
“-” exclude pages that meet this criteria
Got that? Thought not. Wouldn’t some kind of simple tool have been a great way to show the power of this? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great idea. But I think more people would be talking about if they could have understood it. Just calling it “macros” turned me off….