Tips for Searching Fish Reports

The simplest search can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your search to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with search language and help you do a more powerful search.  (Kinda like using better bait!)

• Look for words with the same beginning. For example, in your search form type fish* to find fish, fishing, fished, fishy, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these searches, trout and drum and trout near drum, look for the words trout and drum on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

• Refine your searches with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of flounder but not bluefish, write the following search:

  flounder AND NOT bluefish

• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:

  AWFC OR Drumwagon

  This search finds all pages that mention AWFC or Drumwagon or both.

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want Search to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following search:
  
  "trout near jetty"

  Index Server will literally look for the complete phrase trout near jetty.. But if you type the same search without the quotation marks:
  
  trout near jetty

  Index Server searches all documents for the words trout and jetty.

These hints will get you started. Just remember, not all fishermen can spell well!!