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USING HELP STATION'S SEARCH PAGE
If you're still rather new to computers, or simply haven't had much experience with a search facility like this one, Help Station's Site Search might seem a little bewildering. These pointers should help you on your way to success in using it.
The most important thing to remember is that by default this isn't a "plain text" or fuzzy search system. You have to search for specific words, either in the question or in the answer. (See bottom of this answer for Fuzzy searches)
That is, if you want to search for a question that refers to a noisy fan, you can't enter the question
"How do I fix the noisy fan in my Dell PC?"
Because it's highly unlikely that exactly this words will appear in any question or answer. You have to learn how to search for keywords.
PREPARING TO SEARCH FOR A QUESTION
First you need to do a little work yourself.
Have a bit of a think about just what it is you want to find out. It won't help you much to ask for something that is too broad a topic to give you the answers you need.
You may have recently changed to Windows XP, for example, and be experiencing a few problems. Asking Site Search to look for 'Windows XP' is not likely to bring you much joy in solving your problems. Instead, you’d probably find yourself confronted with mountains of information about lots of issues.
But if you have a think first, and decide that your problem is really that you've missed having the 'Network Neighbourhood' icon on your desktop, and are confused about where to start, you could search for Windows XP AND network and find a lot of relevant information.
You may be trying to solve a Microsoft Word problem. The same principle applies. Searching for 'Word' is unlikely to be very helpful to you, but searching for Word AND margins may lead you quickly to an answer.
Whatever your problem, work out a few KEY WORDS you can use to identify your problem, and search for them.
REFINING YOUR SEARCH TERMS
Site Search allows you to use BOOLEAN OPERATORS to help put your search terms together. There's no need to be scared by the term if you haven't come across it before. It’s merely a simple form of calculation that works with words rather than numbers. BOOLEAN is actually quite simple to use. The use of AND in the example above has already set you on your way!
BASIC BITS
Most often, you will only need to use the must simple search functions to get the results you seek.
AND, OR, NOT
These are the most commonly used operators.
Use AND when you wish to find two terms or keywords in a search result. Use OR when you wish to find either of two terms in a search result. Use AND NOT when you wish to exclude something from your search results.
Examples:
printer AND ink
cd-r OR cd-rw
drive AND NOT floppy
(speaker AND setup) AND NOT headphones
() BRACKETS OR PARENTHESES
Parentheses can be used to enclose part of your search term to give it priority. Parts inside brackets will be processed first. In the last example mentioned above, (speaker AND setup) will be processed first and then any hits containing headphones will be omitted from the results.
MORE ADVANCED BITS
Sometimes you’ll find that you need to further refine your search. You may be getting too many results to sift through, or even be having problems remembering the exact term you are searching for.
* WILDCARD
An asterisk is used as a wildcard. It represents any extension of letters. It does not work with dates or numbers.
Example: *one finds documents containing bone, cone, clone, crone, done, drone, gone, telephone (and any other words of any length that end with 'one').
Also, *one* finds documents containing bone, cone, clone, lonely, phoned, stoned, pardoned
You can also use the ? wildcard which replaces a single letter. For example, USB? will find USB1 and USB2 but not USB20.
EXACTCASE
This tells this site to search for the exact case of the word following.
Example: exactcase Apple finds documents containing 'Apple,' but not 'APPLE' or 'apple.'
PARAGRAPH
This finds documents in which the words surrounding PARAGRAPH are in the same paragraph, and ranks them by how close they are.
Example: Intel PARAGRAPH Pentium finds documents in which 'Intel' and 'Pentium' appear in the same paragraph and ranks them by how close the words are within the paragraph.
SENTENCE
This finds documents in which the words surrounding SENTENCE are in the same sentence, and ranks them by how close they are.
Example: Install SENTENCE CDROM finds documents in which 'Install' and 'CDROM' appear in the same sentence and ranks them by how close the words are within the sentence.
OTHER OPTIONS IN SEARCH
Sections
You get the choice here to search HelpStation for questions and answers, or to search our database of Cover CD contents to identify which CD that elusive program or item was included on.
Quantity
If you leave this at the default value of 10 results per page, a search returning more than 40 results will be a problem to you. You'll have easy one-click access to the first four pages of results, and then the 'Next' button might lose track of the rest. It's a bit of a 'bug' in the system which will need to be addressed in time, but there's an easy way around it.
When I use the 'Search facility myself, I go straight to the 'Quantity' setting and change the value to the maximum allowable '50'. If there's more results than that returned by the search, I figure I've definitely not refined my search terms well enough!
Fuzzy Search
You may find that no matter how much thought you've put into determining the 'Key Words' to search for, you simply can't locate the results you're looking for. That may mean that the answer simply isn't in our database yet. Or it may mean you didn't quite get the search terms that were needed. Using a 'Fuzzy Search' will return results of similar searches and may just find the answer you want. Try it and see!
Word Variants
This one should be self-explanatory. It simply allows the search to include results where the 'Key words' have suffixes and/or prefixes added to them.
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