J. L. HUDSON, SEEDSMAN, BOX 337, LA HONDA, CALIFORNIA 94020-0337 USA
Guidelines for Successful
Searches
By Mike Olds
Some general information about performing a successful search. These tips will help your searches
with most search engines on the web.
Contents:
Just click on the links to jump to these sections.
Basic Search Rules
Using "ANY" or "ALL"
Use Boolean Logic
"+", Boolean "AND"
"|", Boolean "OR"
"-"
Using Quote marks to Search for Phrases
Using Wild-Cards "*"
Other ways to search
Basic Search Rules
This search engine helps you find documents on this website that contain information you wish to
research. You tell the search engine what you're looking for by typing in key words, or phrases in
the search form. The search engine responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in the index
relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results. My
personal belief is that these search engines do not yet really serve us well in that they do not
take one to the exact spot in a file where the citation occurs. Until the time that they do, I
suggest that after you have gone to a page that was listed by the search engine as containing the
word or phrase you are searching for, you may use the "Find" function, under the
"Edit" button of your browser, to seek out the exact spot of your reference on the page.
The Three Types of Searches:
ANY, ALL, and a limited, modified form of Boolean.
But first: This search engine is case-insensitive and accent insensitive (and the operators
"AND", "NOT" and "OR" MUST be typed in as "+" for AND,
Using "ANY" or "ALL"
Use "ALL" when you want your search results to cite pages in
which each and every single word listed is found somewhere on the page cited.
Use "ANY" when you want your search results to cite pages in which any OR all of the words
listed are found somewhere on the page cited.
The operators "+",
Use "ANY" without any operators when a search using "ALL", or "ANY"
with operators, has failed to produce results.
Use Boolean Logic (limited!) to narrow a search.
A little technical history: Boolean Logic is a symbolic logic system
named after the Englishman, Afaik Boole, who wrote an article called "An Investigation in the
Laws of Thought" (1854), which dealt with "classes" which was the basis for the work
of Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon, an American mathematician and computer scientist, which proved that
Boole's logic could be used with relays and switches, which is only a short hop, skip and a jump to
linking words together in various ways to sharpen the focus of searches.
The Fluid Dynamics search engine uses a simple parser (a set of rules for recognizing types of items
in a document—words, numbers, HTML tags, URLs, etc—and sorts them into units that a program is
able to manipulate) that knows how to deal with "+",
If you are going to use the modified "Boolean" logic available on this search engine,
place the operator ("+"...) in front of and adjacent to the word it is modifying
(e.g.: +word +word = Boolean "word AND word"). (And note that "+" in this
instance means "this word MUST appear on the page" whereas the
"+", Boolean "AND"
+word +word = both words must appear in the document
Examples: +San +Francisco, +First +Lastname, +Boolean +Logic
Example: +sunflower +red
"|" Boolean "OR" (or use ANY without
operators)
word |word = use this to find variations on or expansions of a word or
concept, documents with either word will appear in the search results
Examples: cooks |chefs; cooks |recipes; recipes |cookies
Example: firewood |fuelwood |charcoal
word -word = Note that the operator
Examples: stocks -soups; bonds -bail; bail -hay
Example: name -address;
Using Quote marks to Search for Phrases
Use double quote marks "word phrase" for full phrase
searches. For example use "finely divided leaves" to find any case where all three words
occur together in that order where without the quotation marks the results would be of any instance
of the occurrence of any one, or two, or three of the words separately or together and in any order.
Use quote marks to form groups with other words or phrase-groups.
Example: +"fast growing" +"impenetrable hedge". The words "fast
growing" must be found together, and together (on the same page) with the phrase
"impenetrable hedge". But this will include any page where they occur - this means that
one plant on the page may say "fast growing" and another will be "impenetrable
hedge", so it won't necessarily find just one plant with both these qualities, a limitation of
the search engine.
Example: +"San Francisco" -Fran; "Los Angeles" |LA +smog
Using Wild-Cards "*"
Use wildcards to search for words where portions of the word are
variable or unknown. Any word with the known letters plus any other letters will be included in the
results.
Example: shrub* = will find shrub, shrubby, shrublet, shrublets, etc.
Example: germ* = will find germ, germs, germaine, German, Germany, germinates, germination, etc.
Other ways to search
Searching for web addresses:
If your search term is a URL, like " http://www.econbot.org ",
this search engine will redirect you directly to the URL. To avoid this behavior, and do an actual
search with the URL as the search term, to find where that URL is mentioned on this site, enclose
the URL in double-quotes.
text:yourwordshere
Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link,
or URL. The search text:ultraviolet would find all pages with the term "ultraviolet" in
them.
title:yourwordshere
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title
bar of most browsers). The search title:perishable would find pages with "perishable" in
the title.
url:yourwordshere
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL (good for searching Forum topics). Use
url:"Leg Muscles and Attachment" to find all pages that have that phrase in the path, or
filename - the complete URL, in other words.
Many thanks to Michael Olds for these search tips.