Search using Stract's API -- Stract Search

This site uses the Stract search engine API to search the Web. Feel free to explore and play with the different types of searches that are listed on the left menu. If you'd like to try a basic search, start here. Stract uses the site: and intitle: special syntax so feel free to use them in your query.

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The Domain Search tool does a Stract search, identifies the domains appearing most frequently in your search, and lists those at the top. Click on one of them to rerun your search specifically for that domain.
Enter your search query. Stract uses the site: and intitle: special syntax so feel free to use that.

One of the problems with searching for something you know little about is that it's sometimes difficult to narrow down your query. The Popular Word explorer runs your search, identifies the most popular words in the titles of the search results, and lists them for you. Click on one to rerun your basic search with the additional popular word.

Sometimes you don't want every last possible result for your search. Sometimes you just want the lowdown on a topic. Lowdown Search restricts its results to a list of information/reference sites. Not good for detailed queries, very good for general ones.

Time & Title Explorer

Did you know that many content management systems and blogs integrate the publish date into their Web pages? For example, here's an example URL from my Web site ResearchBuzz:

https://researchbuzz.me/2024/04/05/this-is-an-article/

You can tell this article was published on April 5th because the URL contains the string 2024 (year)/04 (month)/05 date.

Though not all Web pages denote a date in this way, the URL pattern is useful to know because it allows you to do date-based searching without relying on search syntax and without worrying too much about dynamic content breaking your search.

That's what the Time & Title Explorer does. Enter your search query along with a range of years. The further back you go the less-well it works, but I've had plenty of luck searching as early as 1994. Feel free to experiment; I tried a search for libertarian between 1980 and 1983 and got a lot of political statement/reference sites, which was interesting. Your query will run as a series of searches, with inurl:yyyy added for each year specified.

Once you've entered a query and year span, click Search. When everything's finished you'll get a big green button that says Show Popular Words for All Years. Click it and you'll get a list of the most popular title keywords for each year's worth of results. The keywords are clickable; when you click them your original query will run along with the keyword you clicked on with an inurl: element added for the year you clicked on.