Site Search Engine

Tips for successfully Searching the Site

Each term may be preceded by the standard Boolean operators not, and, or or. If you search for "beach not dogs", you'll find all documents containing the word "beach" except those documents which also contain the word "dogs". If you type in "and beach and dogs and walking", you'll find only those documents which contain all three search terms. The default value is or. Thus, a search for "beach dogs walking" would return pages with at least one of the three terms.

Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "beach -dogs" is equivalent to the first example, and "+beach +dogs +walking" will return the same documents as the second.

If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "Penzance", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing "Penzance" will be found. On the other hand, lowercase words like "penzance" will generate hits from "Penzance", "PENZANCE", or "penzanCE" as well as from "penzance".

To group a collection of words, use quotes. For example, the query "Minack Theatre" (quotes included) would not generate a hit from "Theatre on the cliffs named Minack" but would generate a hit from "the Minack Theatre on the cliffs". Without quotes, the sentence would count. Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on '+the +cliffs not "the cliffs"' would return only those documents where "the" and "cliffs" appear separately.

The Search Engine finds words, not strings. A search for "in" would turn up only that word, not "bin","inside", or "singing". To perform a string search, preface your term with the dollar sign - a query on "$in" would find all words lists above. Note that more complex wildcard searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the asterisk in your query will return a list of all files, but that's its only function.

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