ITLE>Search Engine Instructions

Search Engine Instructions

This search engine can be as simple - or as complex - as you would like to make it. Most people will merely want to insert one or more keywords, select the type of search, and go. The types of searches available are:

Or	Any keyword found, will trigger a "hit"
And	All keywords must be found to trigger a hit
Exact	Your search query will be used as-is in the search function as a single arguement. Perl expressions are allowed.

Search keys can be simple words, listed all on one line; alternately, they can be a phrase or pair of words if you quote the text. Anything in quotes will count as a single search key. Ie, "silly bear" will count as one search - for the words "silly bear" appearing together.

If you need greater flexability than this, you can instead preface each of your search keys with a token specifying how to treat each key. Each key will be checked in the order it is listed, throughout the entire web page being searched. Your search instructions have the flexability to have various requirements, such as "and", "but not if", etc. A sample search could easily be


   +dogs -cats |siamese

The above search would look for any pages that mention dogs, but must not have cats in the search phrase. However, after checking for the dogs and cats, a search for siamese is done, and if found, will register a "hit" - even though it's a type of cat. Effectively, you're looking for dogs, hate cats, but will tolerate the Siamese variety.

The search tokens are:

|
Performs an "or" search. Merely registers a hit if found, but does not unregister a hit if not found.
+
Performs an "and" search. This will register a hit only if the search key is found, *and* we've already dediced that the page is a hit from a previous search key.
-
performs a "not" search. This will prevent a page from being a hit, if the search key is found.

Finally, the last touch of flexability: regular expressions. In particular, of the Perl variety. "." will match anything once. ".*" will match 0 or more of anything. "-*" will match 0 or more dashes. "[abc]" will match any of the three letters, a b or c. For more information on regular expressions, visit the manual page for Perl Regular Expressions - it's a subject that is far deeper than a simple web page can provide :-).

Bear in mind "A Modern Herbal" was written with the conventional wisdom of the early 1900's. This should be taken into account as some of the information may now be considered inaccurate, or not in accordance with modern medicine.

\|	Performs an "or" search. Merely registers a hit if found, but does not unregister a hit if not found.
+	Performs an "and" search. This will register a hit only if the search key is found, and we've already dediced that the page is a hit from a previous search key.
-	performs a "not" search. This will prevent a page from being a hit, if the search key is found.