Our family history website has more than 500 pages of old letters, photos, news clips, family records, etc. But searching it can present problems. Page one of this "guidebook" covered the basics of using our site's search engine, FreeFind.
This page covers more advanced search techniques, that may be useful to someone who does a lot of searches -- or who has very specific or very complex search needs.
A third page, "Case Studies", covers actual searches people made, and discusses alternate search queries that might have produced better results for them.
ANDs and ORs. You learned that if you type in cat dog pig, it will give you a list of all the web pages that contain the word 'cat', or the word 'dog', or the word 'pig'. You also learned to do "AND" searches, not just OR searches. That If you wanted all the web pages that contained the word 'Robert' and also the word 'Lugg' you could use the plus sign. E.g. by typing +robert +lugg in the search box you'd get an AND search.
PHRASES. You learned that you can search for a phrase, such as Robert Lugg, by entering "robert lugg", enclosed in quotes, into the search box. That will give you all occurrences of the word 'Robert' followed immediately by the word 'Lugg'. We have a Robert Preston Lugg in the family tree plus a Robert Samuel Lugg and a Robert Sherer Lugg. Typing "robert p. lugg" into the search block would find some instances of the former and "robert s. lugg" would find some instances of the second & third.
You also learned to use a "wildcard" to represent any character in a phrase. We could find instances of all of them in one search by using the wildcard symbol ? to stand for any one character. Entering "robert ?. lugg" into the search box would find instances of either the 'p' version or the 's' version in one search.
Ending a search word with a wild card. You also learned that FreeFind by default finds variations of an English language "word root." If you search for 'climb' it will retrieve 'climbs', 'climbed' and 'climbing'. And if you search for 'Green' it will retrieve 'Greene' as well. The ? wildcard only works for a single character in fixed position in a word -- being the nth character. So, if you want to search for both 'Seely' and 'Seeley' it's no help. But there's a different wild card symbol, the asterisk [*], that you use at the end of a word and can match any number of characters. Entering seel* into the search box will find both 'Seely' and 'Seeley'.
You could even find 'Mourey', 'Mowrey' and 'Mourie' in a single search by entering Mo?r* into the search box -- if you were aware of those spelling variations.
Lastly, you learned that if volunteers add Keywords to a webpage, searchers have a better chance of finding the pages they are looking for.
And even though this article is about searching the entire website, there's another search tool, CTL-F, that will search whatever web page you are currently on,
If you
want to do a more complex search, click on advanced
search. That brings up a box that allows you to use NOTs [none] to
control your search, not just ORs [any] and ANDs [all].
Of the options in the shaded area, You may b-e interested in the check box for case sensitive. Usually FreeFind doesn't care whether the letters you type into the search box(es) are upper or lower case, nor the letters in the documents it's searching. But if you are searching for the surname 'Young' and don't want documents containing "young boy" among your "hits", then check that box and make sure you capitalize 'Young' in the search box.
Similarly, you want to search specifically for a German word/name containing an umlaut [Ü], or a French word/name containing an acute [á, é]or grave [à, è], a Scandinavian word/name containing some of their special characters [æ, ø, å], etc. you'd put a check mark in accent sensitive check box and include the special character(s) you're looking for, or a word containing them, in the search box.
Speaking of Scandinavian names, don't forget that you can search for name variants like Oleson/Olesen by simply searching for oles?n.
You don't have to go to the Advanced Search Box to use ANDs. Previously you learned you could enter +robert +lugg in the regular search box, to search for 'robert' AND 'lugg'. Alternatively, you could enter robert AND lugg where 'and' must be in upper case. Remember, with AND or OR searches, word order in the search box doesn't matter -- order only matters in phrases.)
Boolean Searches. Important to some will be the ability to do boolean searches, e.g. the ability to uses parentheses and AND, OR and NOT in searches. For instance we could type (john OR james OR sam*) AND (campbell OR hazl*) in the search box.
Trickier Phrases. But our previous searches for "Robert Lugg" or "Robert ?. Lugg" wouldn't find occurrences of 'Robert Preston Lugg' or 'Robert Samuel Lugg' or 'Robert Sherer Lugg'. They were for exact matches - no intervening words. But we could find all of those names with a single search if we typed [robert lugg] into the search box, using square brackets instead of double quote marks. The square brackets instruct FreeFind to search for a phrase, but allow there to be a couple of intervening words. But that may not be enough in some cases. The name Maria de Los Angeles Escalante Chapling. is in our family tree. Searching for [Maria Chapling] might not find her because of all the intervening words.
But if we replace the square brackets [ ] with braces (sometimes called "curly brackets") so that {maria chapling} was in the search box, that would allow more intervening words and our search would be successful.
In review, we have 3 ways of searching for phrases:
That's a lot to absorb in one setting. But the more searches you do, the better you'll become at it.
Your ingenuity is the main limitation on the powerlessness of your searches. The following is a silly example, but illustrates that you can put many features to use simultaneously. For instance, you could construct this query:
((A* Owlett AND (bosard OR snavely)) AND ((blackwell OR tomb OR gamble) AND (lycoming OR bradford) AND t?m) OR [woodhull ny]).
But I don't know why anyone would want to. 
Remember: If you want to learn more, there's a third page, "Case Studies", which covers actual searches people made, and discusses alternate searches that might have produced better results for them.
Want to take a quizz? Click HERE.
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