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SEARCH
Search tools can be very frustrating if you have expectations that are not within the capability of the particular tool you are using. Search tools on the Internet vary widely in what they can do and how they should be used. This document explains how the search option for TXARTS.net works. The most important thing to understand, when using any search tool, is what its index contains. At TXARTS.net you are searching an index of all words on every page we manage. The pages on TXARTS.net have text on them and that is what the search tool indexes. Many of our pages offer links to pages managed by other organizations. We have hundreds of these links to pages outside of TXARTS.net. The text on the pages we link to is not included in our search tool’s index. That means you can not search the content of those external resources. You can only search TXARTS.net to find our link to those resources. A good example would be if you wanted to look at information about crafts. You would ask our search tool to locate every page managed by TXARTS.net that has the word crafts on it. The search tool will report back a list of pages it found containing the word craft or crafts. The more times a page contains the word you are searching for, the higher it is ranked in the results of your search. If you use more than one key word it ranks pages higher that contain all the key words, and even higher if one or more of those words are repeated on the page. It even looks at the proximity of those words on each page in determining its ranking. To improve your odds of finding everything, you might want to use more than one key word in your search. In searching for crafts you might want to use crafts jewelry metal smith. Once you have the results of your search, select each page it found and look for the key word(s) you used. An easy way to find those words is to use the Find option on your web browser (Netscape). The Find option will look for one word at a time on the page you have loaded (are currently viewing). As an example, you can ask it to jump down the page stopping at every occurrence of the word craft. A good rule in using search tools is to use key words that will get you in the general neighborhood of what you are looking for. This means that you want to select key words that are general in nature. An example would be, if you are looking for sparrows, search for birds. We hope this helps you understand how the TXARTS.net search option works. You can use these guidelines when you encounter a search option most anyplace on the Internet. One last thing to remember. A good search tool will eliminate the need of searching for versions of the word such as image imaging images. You can search for image and it will find all three. The search tool at TXARTS.net works this way. |
