Site Search

Search The Coffee Nebula

Search Tips

Some things to bear in mind when searching:

• The search is case insensitive. You can type in your search in either upper or lower case, and it will return all pages found that match that search, whatever their capitalisation or lack of it.
• The more words you use, the more relevant the results will be.
• The more similar words you use the better. The search engine understands synonyms, and the more words that mean the same it finds, the more relevant the results will be.
• If you want to look for a specific phrase, put it in double quotes to ensure that the search engine looks for those words in that exact order.
• Use a plus or minus sign immediately before a word or phrase to indicate words that must or must not appear in your search results.
• Use the * character to do wildcard searches.
• You can search for words occurring in particular parts of a page, such as the page title or the alternate text for an image. To do this you need to specify the search type, followed by ":", then the word or phrase you want to search for. Don't leave any spaces between either the search type and the colon, or the colon and the word or phrase. Search types available are:
  

  title:	(searches the page titles that display on the title bar of the browser)
  body:	(searches the main, visible part of the pages)
  alt:	(searches the alternative text for the images on the pages)
  desc:	(searches the contents of the description meta tag for the pages)
  keys:	(searches the contents of the keywords meta tag for the pages)
  url:	(searches the web address of the pages)

• If you make a spelling mistake, the search engine will make a guess by looking for similar sounding words. This can be useful, but does mean that a few odd pages pop up in the results from time to time: for instance, containing "cave" where you were looking for "coffee".

Search Results

By default the pages found that match your search will be displayed in descending order of relevance. If you'd rather see the newest pages that match your search instead, you can change to viewing them in that order by clicking on the "Sort By Date" link. This toggles with the "Sort By Score" link to switch between the two views.

Also by default, the pages found will show you the following information:

• The page title. This is a hyperlink which you can then click on to go to the page that interests you.
• A brief description of the page.
• Up to five page excerpts showing you how and where your search term is used in the body of that page.
• The address of the page.
• The search score of the page as a percentage, the page size in bytes, and the date it was last updated.

You can see more results on a page if you switch off the page descriptions and excerpts. To do this, click on the "Hide Summaries" link. To view page summaries again, click on the "View Summaries" link to switch back.

Problem Words

There are a number of words which appear on every page of this site. "Coffee" and "Nebula", for instance. Not to mention everything on the navigation bars at the top and bottom of the page! Which makes it slightly more difficult to search for them, since your search results will inevitably return every single page.

There are a number of ways you can get around this:

• You can accept that all the pages will be returned, and rely on the search ranking to show you the most relevant pages first.
• You can look at the page description and the content excerpts that show you where your search word is used in the page, which again should give you a good indication of whether it's what you're looking for or not.
• You can try using the word in a phrase, or in conjunction with other words, to refine your search.
• You can use body:coffee or body:nebula to search for those two words. This will make the search ignore their appearances in the title bar for the page, and should only return you a handful of relevant hits.
• You can use title:gazetteer or keys:gazetteer to search for pages related to the Gazetteer section. This will make the search ignore their appearances in the main body of the page (where the navigation bars are located), but will search the title bar and keywords for the page for relevant hits. The same will work for any of the other words on the navigation bars.

Putting common words such as "a", "the", "and" or "of" into your list of words to search is generally a bad idea, since you'll probably find that they're included on most of the pages! If you're searching for something like [seven of nine], you'll get all the pages that only contain "of", as well as those that mention "seven" or "nine". Put quotes around all three words and turn it into a phrase to get better results. Then add "seven" on its own if you want to cover less formal mentions of the character!