Search Tips - Public Site
Note: The Texas SAR search engine covers the public web site and includes the Ladies Auxiliary site. It does not cover any chapter web sites. Click here for search tips on searching Chapter web sites.
How To Use the search engine:
Click inside the "glass" icon seen at the upper right of any web page.
Type your keyword(s) in the search field.
With your cursor still inside the "glass" icon, press Enter.
Your search results will be shown. On the search results page, you can refine your search by:
Making your selections of search preferences.
Selecting the category(s) of files that you want to search.
Clicking the Submit button to restart/refine your search.
Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching to help narrow the result if necessary (using the "all search words" selection). The default search is to present results found on html (web) pages only. Select other/additional categories if you want to include them in your search.
More Basics - An Overview
What is a Word?
When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters, numbers, foreign characters, and join characters (dots, hyphens, underscores, apostrophes). Any valid character immediately followed by one of the previous join characters, immediately followed by another valid character will be considered part of the same word. Any character other than the above which is not a valid join character will act as a word separator. You can normally separate words using white space and tabs.
What is a Phrase?
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. Quotes will work to find a phrase regardless of whether you have "any search words" or "all search words" selected.
Example #1: To find information about flag protocol, type "flag protocol manual" in the search box.
General Tips for Searches
Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".
Word stemming is not used, so searching for something like "run" will not return "runs", "running", etc.. Use wildcards (below) if you want returns with part(s) of your search term(s).
All searches are accent insensitive as well. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ so searching for "Gálvez" will find "Galvez".
Search Functions
All Search Words:
Every word entered needs to be found to produce a search result.
Any Search Words:
Any word entered that is found will produce a search result.
Phrase Search (using quotes):
Your entire entry in the order it was entered needs to be found to produce a search result.
Category:
You can select multiple categories, but your search will be more refined if you select an appropriate category. This will limit your search to an appropriate area or types of files on the web site so you won't be overwhelmed with too many irrelevant links.
All - all categories are searched
Web pages - only the standard web pages are searched
PDF, Doc, and Xls files - only those document types are searched (see note below about pdf files)
Texas Compatriot - only text of the The Texas Compatriot volumes is searched
Additional General Search Tips
Use of Wildcards:
Allows you to search for parts of a word (although a lot more results may appear using this search method). Wildcards could be used like:
*searchme
*searchall*
*search*more*
Example: Try march* to find march, marched, or marching.
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 (without a space). If the + sign is used in a search, stemming will be used (you can't combine it with the ! for a strict search). 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 (without a space).
PDF files:
PDF files have issues with respect to indexing. There are many ways to compress the contents of pdf files and this can make it difficult to extract the contents. There are many ways to make pdf files with many different programs, to the extent that something that is supposedly a standard turns out not to be. The way that data is stored in a pdf file can result in a word not being stored as continuous characters in the file, so it can't be readily identified as a word you want to find.
In addition, pdf files can consist of only an image of text, which results in no actual text to search at all. All of these issues can make for strange results when searching pdf's, but it is still worth the effort.