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Search Rules
This search engine helps you find documents on this website and related sites. Here's how it works: you tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.
How To Use:
- Type your keywords in the search box.
- Press the Search button to start your search.
Example:
- Type Bill Shatner in the search box.
- Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
What is a keyword?
When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.
If you search for a "specific phrase," it will return only those pages
which include that precise phrase. If you are looking for Melanie Shatner,
type that in the search box and choose "a specific phrase."
You would get this result. (Five responses when I tested it.)
If you search for "all of these words," it will return only those pages
which include every word you have typed. This, if you search for Melanie
Shatner using "all of these words," you will get some, perhaps many
irrelevant results - pages that include Melanie Griffith and Bill Shatner,
for example.
You get this result. (Twenty responses when I tested it, and we know
only five are relevant.)
If you search for "any of these words," it will return the complete list
of all pages with the word Bill OR the word Shatner. That sounds kind of
useless, and it us (sample result - 615 responses, and we know only five are relevant) - unless you
learn how to use quote marks, asterisks, and boolean operators. We're coming
to that.
Boolean operators: Including or excluding words
To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.
Example: To find pages where Melanie Shatner is mentioned and father Bill
is not, change the matching string to "any of these words", then search for
+"Melanie Shatner" -Bill -William ...
and get this result. It's
quite precise. There was only one such page when I tried it. Poor Melanie,
with no separate identity! Even the one page which meets those criteria
referred to her as Captain Kirk's daughter, although it did not mention Bill
by name.
Quotation marks: including or excluding phrases
You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific
words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. There are two ways
to do this. The simplest is to choose "a specific phrase" and simply type in
the exact phrase you want to search for.
You can accomplish the same thing by choosing "any of these words" and
placing your phrase or phrases in quotation marks. Why would you want to do
it this way instead of the automatic way? Because it gives you additional
options. For example, if you want to get really tricky, type two
phrases in quote marks and place a + before each of them. This will show
only those pages which include both of those specific phrases.
Expand your search using wildcards (*):
By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters. Can't
remember how to spell Gwyneth Paltrow? Try searching for G*eth Palt* and get
the right result.
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Searches are case-insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".
Searches are accent insensitive as well. (Accent sensitivity relates to characters like
"ñ," which is treated the same as "n.")
Don't type in common words like "in" or "love" unless they are part of a
specific phrase. The computer will completely ignore words like "in," which
will produce zero results if you search for it. On the other hand, words
like "love" will return far too many results to be useful. Shakespeare in
Love is a good search for "a specific phrase" mode, but not for "any of
these words" mode, unless it is contained in quotation marks. Just typing in
the three words and searching for "any of these words" produces meaningless
results - 85% of the pages on our site show up in the results! That's 6,000
"hits", of which only 76 are relevant.
Fancy Features for Typical Searches
You can search more than just text. Here are other ways you can search:
text:searchterm
You want only those pages which mention Shatner in the page body? Type in
text:Shatner, choosing "any of these words." By way of comparison, searches without the "text:" attribute will scan the URL, title, links, and META tags as well as the document body.
title:searchterm
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title
(which appears in the title bar of most browsers). Let's say you want the
movie reviews for all films with Vampire in the title, but no other pages
using the "v" word. Type in title:vampire and get a result like
this.
url:searchterm
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL.
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