This search facility finds matching text in web pages, documents, and downloads from all public areas of vismor.com.
Currently, the default search behavior includes:
Stemming. The search engine takes some liberties when interpreting your query. One of which is referred to as “stemming”. This allows searches to match words which are similar to or derivatives of each other. For example, stemming matches plural forms of words to their singular forms. More concretely, a search for the word boat will match boats and boating.
Ignored words. in a similar vein, several common words such as the, and, or are deemed to be “skip words” and are ignored during a search.
Match all search words. Search for pages which contain all of the given search terms (boolean AND). The results will be sorted in order of the number of terms matched, and the determined relevancy score.
Click the “match any search words” button to change this option to search for pages which contain any of the given search terms (boolean OR).
Spelling suggestions. Alternate spelling suggestions are often provided when a search yields fewer than than three results. These suggestions are generally based on words that actually exist on the web site. Be forewarned, the suggestions may bear little resemblance to the actual words that you typed.
Advanced options include:
Wildcard matches. You can use wildcard characters ‘*’ and ‘?’ in your search terms to search for multiple words and return larger set of results. An asterisk character (‘*’) in a search term represents any number of characters, while a question mark (‘?’) represents any single character.
This allows you to perform advanced searches such as tree* which would return all pages containing words beginning with “tree”. Similarly, t??e would return all pages containing four letter words beginning with ‘t’ and ending with ‘e’. Also, *car* would be a search for any words containing the string “car”.
Exact phrase matches. When phrases are enclosed by double quotes, words are matched based on the specific order in which they are encountered on the page (e.g. a search for “public downloads” (with double quotes) will not match “downloads public” or “public something downloads”.
You can also combine the use of exact phrase searches with normal search terms and wildcard search terms within a single search query (e.g. “green tea” japan*). Note however, that wildcards within exact phrases (e.g. “green te*”) are not supported.
Exclusion/negative searches. You can precede a search term with a hyphen character to exclude that search term from being Included in your search results. For example, a search for cat -dog would return all pages containing the word “cat” but not the word “dog”.
Note: The text search engine is not very good at finding file names (generally, it indexes the content of files not their names). Use the file search facilities in the download area to look for specific download files by name—they were designed for this task.