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Put phrases in quote marks like this: "search engines"

Please be aware that this search engine searches only The Flying Cat. It does not search the Internet nor the World Wide Web. If you need to search the entire Internet, you may be interested in my collection of search engines.

Search Help

If you will take a few minutes to look over the following examples you will enjoy considerably more success.

You can use Alta Vista's Simple query + and - or you can use boolean terms as described below. The + requires the term or phrase to be present. The - forbids the presense of the term or phrase.

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

This search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Requiring terms to be present


Translated: require Gingrich, require hunting
Finds "Newt Gingrich on the male hunting instinct", and "the male hunting instinct of Gingrich".
Does not find the lowercase "gingrich", nor the abbreviated "hunt Gingrich".

Requiring one term and Forbiding the presence of another term


Translated: forbid anarchy, require hunting
Finds "hunting and gathering", "hunting Godot", and lowercase "male hunting instinct".
Does not find "Hunting and Gathering" nor "hunting anarchy".

Searching for a phrase

This can be a very powerful approach. A "phrase" is two or more words that must appear exactly in order.

Translated: require the phrase "males are biologically driven"
Finds "males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes".

The Wildcard (*)

The wildcard symbol (*) allows you to "truncate" a word. You can enter the root of a word and find all its various endings.

Translated: find all words beginning with "biolog" not matter how the word ends.
Finds "biology", "biological", "biologically".
You can use the wildcard at the beginning and the end of a word. "*mouse* will find "mousey" and "mouse" and "dormouse".

Using the boolean OR


Translated: prefer Gingrich, prefer piglets
Finds "Gingrich says men are basically little piglets", and "wallow in a ditch like little piglets".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

The boolean AND

The boolean AND requires the word be present. This works just like the + noted above. THe "and term must appear in front of the term.

Translated: require gingrich (case insensitive), require words starting with "piglet"
Finds "Real life thoughts from Newt", "little piglets", "wallow in a ditch like little piglets".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

The boolean NOT

The boolean NOT is useful for excluding pages with the selected word or phrase.


Translated: require Alice (case sensitive), require UNIX (case sensitive), forbid eunuch, prefer grep
First lists "Alice in UNIX land", then "grep UNIX".
Does not list lowercase "alice in unix land", nor forbidden "picture of eunuch".

Ignored terms and using the phrase and wildcard in a search

This is a more complex search. Certain common words, like "where" and "is" are ignored by the search engine. If you feel you are sure of the phrase you are looking for, then use the quote marks to surround, embrace, the phrase. Also, note here how you can truncate (use wildcards) at the beginning and end of a word.

Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "mouse"
Finds "mouse", "dormouse", and "mousey". To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *mouse*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "unix" will match "Unix", "UNIX", and "uniX", while the term "UNIX" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for th* would be ignored.


1994 - 2008 Paula Edmiston

http://theflyingcat.com/search.html
Last Edited: 01 Dec 05