Search

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages of riverbanks.org. When you use this function, the entire index is searched using the entered keywords, phrases, or questions.

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search function needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your search results. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search field.

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR". By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like ñ.

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 field. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search field. Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins, try "recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin".

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters. Example: Try wish* to find wish, wishes, or wishful.

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search:

link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring of it. Use link:microsoft.com to find all pages linking to Microsoft sites.

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:Elvis would find pages with Elvis in the title.

url:text
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:altavista to find all pages on all servers that have the word altavista in the host name, path, or filename – the complete URL, in other words.