The Basics
The Intermediate Search engine is a Perl script that scans all the HTML and text files on this Web site for the words, phrases, and/or strings you specify in the search box (identified in the examples as typewriter text contained within square brackets (e.g., [ term1 term2 ]). Words, phrases, and strings and referred to as “search terms” or sometimes just “terms” and can be either inclusive or exclusive. Inclusive terms can be either Optional (via “OR”) or Required (via “AND” or “+”), while exclusive terms are always Forbidden (via “NOT” or “-”).
A word is a whole word, not a piece of a word (e.g., [ rocket ] will not find “rockets”). A phrase consists of words separated by spaces and bounded by double quotation marks (e.g., "National Space Society"). Phrase format is the best means to find adjacent words. Note that hyphenated words (e.g., NSS-sponsored) are treated as a single word, and thus do not require double quotation marks. A string can be either part of a word or phrase (e.g., [ $rocket ] will find “rockets”). Note that any uppercase letter in a term makes the search for it case-sensitive.
The format for the search terms, referred to as “query syntax” by database experts, is very similar to that used by two of the most popular search engines, Infoseek and Altavista. If the tips on this page are not sufficient, please see Altavista’s Search Tips for additional information. Those search engines (like many others) search their own internal databases, created by periodically scanning the Web files whose URLs (i.e., addresses or locations) have been previously submitted to them. Thus, they do not know about every file on every Web site, and their information is usually a week to a month old. (They make up for this deficiency by having extensive internal databases.) This search engine, on the other hand, actually scans this Web site’s files themselves, thus it always returns the most up-to-date information.
The Details
Case Sensitivity
If you want to find all occurrences of a term regardless of whether it is lowercase, uppercase, or a mix of the two, enter it as lowercase. For example, the lowercase term [ space ] will find files containing the word “space”, “SPACE”, “Space”, and even “sPaCe”.
On the other hand, if you know the exact case usage of the term you are looking for (e.g., because it is a proper noun, part of a title, or acronym), enter it as you want it found. For example, the uppercase search term [ HALO ] will only find files containing the uppercase word “HALO”; the mixed-case search term [ "National Space" ] will only find files containing the mixed-case phrase “National Space”.
Optional Terms
(use of default keyword “OR”)If you specify more than one search term (e.g. [ space links ]), by default, Intermediate Search will find files containing any of those terms (e.g., either “space” or “links”). Thus, the keyword “or” is automatically inserted if you do not specify either “OR” or “or” between your search terms (e.g. [ space or links ], though technically it is [ or space or links ]).
If the multiple terms you specify are supposed to be adjacent, then use the phrase format of double quotation marks (e.g. [ "space links" ]). If the terms can instead be located anywhere as long as they are in the same file, you must make them Required Terms.
Required Terms
(use of keyword “AND” or “+”)If you specify only one search term (e.g. [ space ] or [ "NSS chapter" ]), by definition it is a required term, though technically (inside Intermediate Search) it is an Optional Term. To specify more than one required search terms, you must prefix each term with either the keyword “AND” or “and” (e.g. [ and space and links ]) or the plus-sign (e.g. [ +space +links ]).
Please note that Intermediate Search) is not that sophisticated; thus the common sense [ space and links ] gets converted to [ OR space and links ] -- the search equivalent of [ space or links ]. Because of this, you may prefer to use the more obvious plus-sign notation.
Forbidden Terms
(use of keyword “NOT” or “-”)To exclude a search term, you must prefix it with either the keyword “NOT” or “not” (e.g. [ space NOT links ]) or the minus-sign (e.g. [ space -links ]). In this example, only those files containing the word “space” but not the word “links” would be found.
In the above example, the single Optional Term “space” acts like a Required Term, even though there is more than one term. This is because Forbidden Terms are independent of the others. They are processed last as a final check. Thus a search on [ +NASA +"space shuttle" -Station ] finds all the files containing both the word “NASA” and the phrase “space shuttle” -- but not the word “Station”. (Note that since the word “Station” was mixed-case, the search could still yield files containing the word “station” or “STATION”.)
StringsA string is a search term (word or phrase) prefixed by a dollar-sign ( $ ). As mentioned above, Intermediate Search requires this special prefix to distinguish parts of a word or phrase (aka substring) from a whole word or phrase. For example, the search term [ rocket ] will not find “rockets”. In this particular case, one could just specify two search terms [ rocket or rockets ]. Alternatively, one could use just the single string search term [ $rocket ].
The risk of using strings is that any word or phrase containing the specified sequence of characters will be found. In our example, the search term [ $rocket ] will also find files containing the words “rocketry”, “rocketman”, and even “sprocket”. A search for [ $in ] would also find files containing “bin”, “inside”, and “acquaintance”. Bottom line, be careful what you ask for -- you might just get it!
Note that more complex wildcard searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the asterisk in your query will return a list of all files, but that’s its only function.
This version of Intermediate Search is an enhancement of the original version (see below), which itself was an enhancement of Simple Search. The original Simple Search was created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt's Script Archive. Like Matt’s script, this version is freeware and can easily be set up on most websites.
Intermediate Search, Version 1.1 is Copyright 1997 (freeware) by
Fluid Dynamics.
Visit the Fluid Dynamics Search Page for help files and most recent version.
Version 1.1a enhancements by Ronnie Lajoie, last updated on 4-Jan-1999.
This page is maintained by Ronnie Lajoie. Send queries and suggestions via E-Mail to: hal5@hiwaay.net