COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR
Jerry Pournelle
Thursday, February 06, 2003
You can use this search form to locate all pages in the Chaos Manor web site that contain a word or phrase you specify. Enter your search string in the box and hit return.
For FULL INSTRUCTIONS SEE Search Tips
From a letter from Bob Thompson who discovered the search engine and helped me get it installed:
I've been watching the searches that your users have been doing. A lot of them are assuming an implicit "and" when they search, e.g. entering the search string:
larry niven
or
larry and niven
assuming that it will find all pages that contain "larry niven" when in fact atomz does an implicit "or", which makes that string look for any pages that contain larry *or* niven in the first case, and ones that contain larry *or* and *or* niven in the second.
You should probably tell your readers that it's an implicit "or" and that to find a string they should enclose that string in double quotes. They can also use standard AltaVista syntax to require or forbid search terms, e.g.:
+larry +niven
finds all pages that contain both larry *and* niven (including those that contain the terms together or separated), or
+larry -niven
finds all pages that contain larry but *not* niven.
Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com