1. While most "search engines" allow for searching by "word(s)" or "phrase(s)" by the use of " " (double quote marks), this search engine will NOT use double quotemarks, search only by words.

2. While most "search engines" allow for searching by "upper" or "lower" case, where the Upper Case stands for only Upper Case letters and the Lower Case can stand for both Upper Case and Lower Case. This results in performing all searches in lower case to get the maximum numerical results, unless other criteria were needed. Thus, a search for "CHURCH", "Church", "church", and "cHURCH" would give different results.

   However, the search engine used on this site is not case sensitive and would yield the same results in all searches. The only restriction is that Boolean Expressions, i.e., must be Upper Case -- "AND", "OR", and "NOT".

3. At present, only exact words MUST be entered for a search. For example, to search both the singular and plural of a word like "library" and "libraries", both words would have to be entered in the "search box" and the "Match" field changed to "Any". This search engine does not use the " * " as a "wildcard" to stand for all the missing letter(s) or number(s) in place of the " * ".

4. The "stars of maximum significance" represents the importance of a Web Page Document meeting the criteria of the search. Five stars represent the best match on Web Page Document on down to one star for the poorest match. A search by "Score" puts the highest ranking first on down to the poorest.

Match:

The match search allows one to use three different criteria in limiting a search. A one word search in the search box can be used under all three: "All", "Any", or "Boolean" with the same results.
All

When entering two or more words in the search box with "All" such as "church growth" would result in a search of "church AND growth" where both words MUST be in the Web Page Document for it to appear in the results listing. Similarly, a seach for " church growth sunday school" in the search box would yield a resurn of "church AND growth AND sunday AND school", where all four words MUST be on that web page. One just can not have "coffee AND cream" black !!!
Any

When entering two or more words in the search box with "Any" such as "church growth" would result in a search of "church OR growth" where EITHER or BOTH words MUST be in the Web Page Document for it to appear in the results listing. Similarly, a seach for "church growth sunday school" in the search box would yield a return of "church OR growth OR sunday OR school", where any one or combination of the four words can be on that web page. Now, one just can not have "coffee OR cream" black or white or a gray color in between!!!
Boolean

When entering a boolean search, one must now use "AND", "OR", and/or "NOT" to get the desired results. One can now search for sugarless coffee with cream by entering "coffee AND cream NOT sugar" in the search box. This would retreived only those Web Page Documents that had both "coffee" and "cream" and exclude those that had the word "sugar" anywhere in the document, i.e., "sugar cookies".

One can search for either "bacon and eggs" or "ham and eggs" a number of different ways. For example, enter the expression "(ham AND eggs) OR (bacon AND eggs)" or "(eggs AND (ham OR bacon)" which results in "eggs and ham" or "eggs and bacon".

Those boolean expressions inside the (   ) are performed first before the rest of the search criteria are tested.

Format:

The "Format:" represents how the output of the search will appear on the screen.

Long

The "Long Format" presents the first occurance of one and/or combination of search word(s) in a description of up to 300 words. This allow a reading of part of the document before having to examine the document.

This description will normally begin with ellipses, i.e., " . . . " indicating that the description was not the first part of the Web Page Document, just as ending ellipses indicates that it was not the end of the web page.

An " * " before a short phrase indicates that the phrase was all or part of the URL discription, i.e., what one clicks on to go to another link on the World Wide Web.

Short

The "Long Format" presents only a listing of the stars of maximum significance and the URL links to the Web Page Documents in the database.

Result Order:

1. The Internet is like a library without a card catalog, just as a bookstore is a library with a cash register. Card catalogs are derived from information found on the title page of a book. The library card contains information about the author and title, and librarians come up with subject information, so a book can be found by author, title, and subject.

2. The Internet has few authors by name, sites without titles, and must eventually rely upon other web sites to link to a web page or upon search engines reading and building an index of the information on a web page. Most people rely upon search engines to find and rank web pages by a search of keywords, which approach thousands of entries.