Spelling
Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. The search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms, but it is always best to spell them correctly.
Multiple Words
Use multiple words when performing your search. More words for a search will return more refined results than a search for a single word.
Similar Words
The more similar words you use in a search, the more relevant the results will be to the words that you are searching for.
Capitalization
Use capitalization when looking for proper nouns such as the name of a person or place. Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used.
Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks to find words that must appear adjacent to each other within a phrase. For example, search for
"emate battery refurbish"
rather than for
emate battery refurbish.
Instead of using quotation marks, you can also check the "Exact Match" checkbox.
Boolean Operators
Precede a search term or phrase with a plus sign to indicate it must appear in a search result. Precede it with a minus sign to omit all results with that term in it. Both signs should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, searching for
+newton -messagepad
will return results that are about Newtons, but not about Messagepads, regardless of the words' capitalization.
Field Searches
Field searches allow you to search for words that appear in a specific part of a document. The field name should include the colon and precede the search word or phrase with no spaces between them. The following fields can be searched:
body:
The text in the body of the page. This is, for example, all the text in the page you are currently reading.
title:
The text in the title of the browser window. The title of this page, for example, is "Search Tips".
alt:
The text you'd see instead of an image if the image can't be loaded. For example, the alt text of the HTML icon below is "Valid HTML 4.01 Strict". If you should ever find it necessary to do such a search, I'd be really interested in the reason...
desc:
Searches in the pages' description meta tags. These tags are mainly used by search engines to summarize what a page is about. Since you cannot see this text on the page, but only when viewing the page's source code, the benefits of this search are somewhat limited.
keys:
Like the description tag, meta keys are usually used by search engines for figuring out what a page is about. You won't see the search text anywhere on the page, but only when viewing the page's source code.
url:
Searches in the pages' url addresses. If, for example, you were searching for
url:"www.pda-soft.de/en/hardware",
you would find all pages in the English hardware section of this site.1 Do not include the "http://" part of the url, otherwise your search will fail.
Good luck!
1Provided that by some magic yours truly will find enough time to finish the ongoing process of rewriting this web site from scratch.
Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. The search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms, but it is always best to spell them correctly.
Multiple Words
Use multiple words when performing your search. More words for a search will return more refined results than a search for a single word.
Similar Words
The more similar words you use in a search, the more relevant the results will be to the words that you are searching for.
Capitalization
Use capitalization when looking for proper nouns such as the name of a person or place. Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used.
Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks to find words that must appear adjacent to each other within a phrase. For example, search for
"emate battery refurbish"
rather than for
emate battery refurbish.
Instead of using quotation marks, you can also check the "Exact Match" checkbox.
Boolean Operators
Precede a search term or phrase with a plus sign to indicate it must appear in a search result. Precede it with a minus sign to omit all results with that term in it. Both signs should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, searching for
+newton -messagepad
will return results that are about Newtons, but not about Messagepads, regardless of the words' capitalization.
Field Searches
Field searches allow you to search for words that appear in a specific part of a document. The field name should include the colon and precede the search word or phrase with no spaces between them. The following fields can be searched:
body:
The text in the body of the page. This is, for example, all the text in the page you are currently reading.
title:
The text in the title of the browser window. The title of this page, for example, is "Search Tips".
alt:
The text you'd see instead of an image if the image can't be loaded. For example, the alt text of the HTML icon below is "Valid HTML 4.01 Strict". If you should ever find it necessary to do such a search, I'd be really interested in the reason...
desc:
Searches in the pages' description meta tags. These tags are mainly used by search engines to summarize what a page is about. Since you cannot see this text on the page, but only when viewing the page's source code, the benefits of this search are somewhat limited.
keys:
Like the description tag, meta keys are usually used by search engines for figuring out what a page is about. You won't see the search text anywhere on the page, but only when viewing the page's source code.
url:
Searches in the pages' url addresses. If, for example, you were searching for
url:"www.pda-soft.de/en/hardware",
you would find all pages in the English hardware section of this site.1 Do not include the "http://" part of the url, otherwise your search will fail.
Good luck!
1Provided that by some magic yours truly will find enough time to finish the ongoing process of rewriting this web site from scratch.
