| Wisconsin
Gateway Search Engine Rules
This
search engine helps you find documents on this website and
related sites. Here's how it works: you tell the search
service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases,
or questions in the search box. The search service responds
by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating
to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at
the top of your results.
How
To Use the Wisconsin Gateway Search Engine:
- Type
your keywords in the search box.
- Press
the Search button to start your search.
Here's
an example:
- Type
Wisconsin
Search Engine in the search box.
- Press
the Search button or press the Enter key.
Tip:
Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact,
use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though
the number of results will be large, the most relevant content
will always appear at the top of the result pages.
More
Basic Search Engine Tips
- An Overview of how Search Engines work
What
is an Index? Is it the same thing as a Search Engine?
Webster's
dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement
of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection
of Web pages and discussion group pages from around the
world. The 'index' becomes larger every day as people send
us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology
that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When
you use our Wisconsin Shopping mall search engine service,
you search the entire collection of sites that we have indexed
by using keywords or phrases to find relevant sites. And
although we are a search engine, we are nowhere near the
scale of sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, AOL,
Ask Jeeves, or other such sites. They have much more money
for bandwidth, to start with, and they have a much broader
number of sites in their directories. Our Wisconsin search
engine is only intended to list Wisconsin-related websites
that offer products and services to you, the Wisconsin internet
shopper.
What
is a Word as defined by a search engine?
When
searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and
numbers. The search engine needs to know how to separate
words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet.
You can separate words using white space and tabs.
What
is a Phrase as defined by a search engine?
You
can link words and numbers together into phrases if you
want specific words or numbers to appear together in your
result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double
quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words
in the search box.
Example
#1: To find lyrics by the King, type "you ain't nothing
but a hound dog" in the search box. You can also create
phrases using punctuation or special characters such as
dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.
Example
#2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999
9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.
Simple
Tips for More Exact Searches
Searches
are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match
the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".
By
default, all searches are accent insensitive as well.
Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ.
Including
or excluding words:
To
make sure that a specific word is always included in your
search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word
in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is
always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-)
sign before the keyword in the search box.
Example:
To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins,
try "recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin".
Expand
your search using wildcards (*):
By
typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.
Example:
Try wish* to find wish, wishing, wishes, or wishful.
Searching
for web addresses:
If
your search term is a URL, like "http://www.wisconsingateway.com/",
some search engines will redirect you directly to the URL.
To avoid this behavior, and do an actual search with the
URL as the search term, enclose the URL in "double-quotes".
Fancy
Features for Typical Searches
You
can search more than just text. Here are all of the other
ways you can search on the net:
link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring
of it. Use link:wisconsingateway.com to find all pages linking
to Wisconsin Gateway pages. Note: this feature is not implemented
on all search engines.
text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in the body
of the document. By way of comparison, searches without
the "text:" attribute will scan the URL, title, links, and
META tags as well as the document body.
title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in
the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers).
The search title:Green Web Design would find pages with
Green Web Design in the title.
url:text
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use
url:greenwebdesign to find all pages on all servers that
have the word greenwebdesign in the host name, path, or
filename - the complete URL, in other words. |
