So... Read this before
searching!!!
Most searches people enter into the search box do not turn up articles
telling them what they want to know. The reason is that the person does not
know what to enter to get a successful result, or cannot spell correctly.
These are the main problems:
-
Can't spell
If you spell a word wrongly it will not be found. An amazing number
of people cannot spell Scruggs. They
enter Scrugs and wonder why nothing turns
up. If they had put scru* instead it
would have worked, because the * (asterisk) is a 'wildcard' that stands
for 'anything'. even *rug* would have
worked! There are a lot of mis-spelled queries...
-
The phrase entered is too complex
Someone recently searched for
"listen to bluegrass" AND "teach yourself
banjo". That is a no-hoper. It means that the article has to contain
both phrases exactly as entered. Teach yourself
with "Match all" checked is a good start, producing 4 results, of
which at least one is useful. Learn banjo turns up 73 items, so it's a good
start - you just refine the search words to narrow it down.
Another over-complex search I saw was (death of
Jim McReynolds) AND (Jim McReynolds). Happily it turned up a short
announcement, but he was lucky. And McReynolds is hard to spell... just
jim mcr* would have been much better.
I was amazed that Duck+Duffey worked.
But it worked only because the September 1997 issue had these two articles
in the contents list:
* The John Duffey Interview (Part
1)
* Bluegrass Day at The Dog & Duck
(a pub)
What luck!
-
Capitalise on unusual
words
If you want to find articles with, say,
Deering in them then just enter
Deering. Making it complicated just makes
it less likely to come up and increases the chance of fatal spelling
mistakes.
More detailed
help
By default the search engine tries to locate pages which have exact matches
for all of the words entered in your search query. If that fails, it then
tries to locate pages which contain any words in your search query. If that
happens a short message is displayed at the top of the search results indicating
this has been done.
In addition, there are several ways to modify the default search
behaviour:
Phrase search
The search engine supports three types of phrase search. To match an exact
phrase, use quotes around the phrase:
Example: "bluegrass banjo"
To match a near (within a couple of words) phrase, use square brackets
[] around the words. Example: [5-string
banjo]
To match a far (within several words) phrase, use braces { } around
the words.
Example: {bluegrass club}
+ and - qualifiers
If you prepend a word with + that word is required to be on the page.
If you prepend a word with - that word is required to not be on the page.
Example: +always
-never
The * wildcard
If a query word ends with a * all words on a page which start the same way
as that query word will match.
Example: gift* or Scru*
The ? wildcard
If a query word contains a ? any character will match that position.
Example: b?g
Boolean searches
You can use the following boolean 'operators' in your
search:
AND, OR, NOT are three 'Boolean operators' which
MUST be in capital letters.
Example: (contact AND us) OR (about AND us)
All of these techniques can be combined. Example:
+alway* -ne??r*
17 April 2004
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