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How to Use the Search Field

As this site contains now more than 100 documents, I offer an intra-site search for my visitors, which allows to to locate any page of my site by keyword.

FreeFind offers this kind of service at no cost; submitting a site is easy and very quick. I expect FreeFind to become a standard in this field of internet services.

Use FreeFind to search within these pages

       

FreeFind has the most powerful query language I have found for any search engine yet: They allow for three different versions of phrase search, the common prefixion with + or - and two different wildcards, ? (one letter in any position) and * (truncation). Moreover, logical operators AND and OR are allowed together with parenthesis levels.

The phrase search is particularly flexible: You may search for an exact phrase by enclosing it in "quotes"; [square brackets] search for a set of words in close vicinity, and {braces} can be used to search for a set of words in a slightly larger environment.

FreeFind will treat precomposed Unicode characters as equal to the base letter. This means that you may omit most diacritics from your search words. For example, hrebicek will find all occurrencies of hřebíček (Czech for clove). This is not true for characters formed with combining diacritic marks for which no precomposed form is available (R̥ will not be found by searching for R). This behaviour can be changed in the Advanced Search form.

Nonlatin scripts are also supported; moreover, a search for a Chinese hanzi finds occurrencies also within words. You may, thus, search for and find references to white spices or foods.

Another strong point of the service is that not only words visible on the page are found, but also meta data enters the index. Since I use the title attribute throughout to flag all non-Latin words, you may search for foreign script terms using the transliteration. E.g., to find Arabic al-jabal [الجبل] (the mountain), you may search for algbl.

I’d like to have Google such advanced features!

Although FreeFind does a good job in keeping its index up to date, there is still a chance to miss recent changes if you rely on the search engine. FreeFind performs some simple keyword normalization to account for English plural and verb-inflexion forms, but further lexical analysis or loose-matching algorithms are not available. Thus, you should enter search words in exactly the same way as they appear in the text.

If you cannot find something with the search engine, try the indices instead!



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