Full text search

Back

Picture of the search plane (in processing your request) Enter one or more search words and click on »Search!«. Concerning extended search possibilities the search syntax is described below.

Extended syntax:   

 


The search syntax

Tabular Summary

  Input Meaning Hit if ...
1. hot dog pizzas Or At least one of the words must occur.
2. hot or dog or pizzas Or Like 1.
3. and hot and dog and pizzas And All search words must occur
4. +hot +dog +pizza And Like 3.
5. dogs NOT pizzas Exclusion The term after NOT may not occur
6. dogs-pizzas Exclusion Like 5.
7. parIS CAPITAL/small CaPiTaL/sMaLl letters are taken into account
8. Paris everything small Upper and lower case letters are ignored
9. $in Partial strings Search for partial strings
10. * All files A complete list of all files is outputted.

 

Detailed explanation

The standard Boolean operators can precede each term - NOT, and, or. If you're looking for dogs NOT pizzas, you'll find all documents containing the word »dogs« - except the documents, in which also the word »pizza« occurs.
If you enter: and hot and dog andpizzas, you only find the documents containging all three search words (thus probably a pizzeria also selling Hot Dogs).

The default value is or. Therefore a search for hot dog pizzas deliveres pages as search result, which contain at least one of the three search words.

The abbreviated notation of Alta Vista functions likewise. A search for dog-pizzas corresponds to the first example, and +hot +dog +pizza produces the same result like the second example.

If a search word contains at least one uppercase letter, like e.g. parIS, the search considers the upper and lower case letters. I.e., only documents with »parIS&« are found. On the other hand the search for paris (everything in lowercase letters) delivers hits containing »Paris«, »PARIS« or »parIS«.

In order to combine several words into a group, you use quotation marks. E.g. the search for "Bill Clinton" (including quotation marks) would not result in a hit, if a document contains "Bill the Kid met former president Clinton". Without quotation marks however this would be a hit. Boolean operators can also be applied to terms in quotation marks: The search for +the +cat NOT "the cat" would deliver only the documents, in which »the« and »cat« are located in different postitions.

The search engine does find words, not character strings. A search for in would only deliver this word, not »binary«, »within«, or »being«. In order to execute a search for a character string, you place a dollar character ($) in front of your search term - a search for $in would find all words listed above. Please note that more complicated joker searches with the asterisk (*) is not permitted. If you include the asterisk into your search query, you simply get a list of all files - and that is its only function.

These rules are based on the query syntax of Alta Vista; a look at their search tips may prove as useful.

The original simple search - cgi Script was written by Matt Wright and can be found at in Matt's Script Archive. Like the Script of Matt this version of Fluid Dynamics is freeware and can easily be employed on most Websites.
A German translation was done by Therese Telepski.