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The simple search capability was added to these pages to help people find information stored in this site. I've tried to create a simple and useful organization system but chances are the one piece of information you need will be in three different obscure locations (Murphy's Law?). This page will help you get the most out of this ultilty.

How Do I Use It?

It's quite simple actually. Just type up to 10 words in the small text area above and click on the Search button. Another page will be brought up showing the search results. The search engine doesn't currently support any fancy keywords like and, not etc... It is also not case sensitive, i.e., vampire is identical to VAMPIRE.

I need help with the search results page, it has all these...numbers!!!

The results page lists documents in the order of best to worst match, the best matches being at the top of the page.

• Score: This represents how well the text in the document matches your search words, the higher the better.
• ( % Score's) If you are searching for more than one word, these values represent how the word's score for that document.

Example: File Found: The Daggerfall Hint Page
. . . .Score: 564 (Excellent) (disease - 70.0%, cure - 20.0%, poison - 10.0%)

This page returned a very good total score, so it has many occurances of the search words. Among the three words, disease appears the most often, followed by cure and poison.

OK, I found a page and went to it. Now what?

It's far too complicated to store the positions of the search words, so the results page simply brings you to the top of found pages. You can continue your search by using your browsers find utility, usually found on a button or in the Edit menu. It's more work for you this way but it beats having to look at 50 web pages before you find what you want.

This isn't as nice as some of the other search engines out there.

Well, I could create an elaborate, nifty, and just about perfect search engine, or spend hours trying to setup WAIS...but I don't see the need for it. This version can narrow your search dramatically enough not too warrant making a more sophiscated one. Of course I'm always welcome to suggestions, comments, etc..., just use the site Contact Form. I will be upgrading the search utility slowly but please be patient.

I want more details on how the search actually works.

Here's the steps the program, written by myself, takes along it's search. Assume the user is searching for disease and cure.

1. Get the query string containing the search strings
2. The files to search in and titles to them are stored in a file in the main directory (point to espfiles.dat to take a peek). This allows me to add/remove files from the search without having to recompile the program. The files are loaded completely into memory one by one and each search string is located using the strstr() function. Currently, only the first 100kb of the file is loaded and searched (which only affects one file I think can of at the moment).
3. When a search string is found, the program checks where it is located.
   • Exact Match 10 Points - cure cure. cure,
   • Half Match 3 Points - cured acure
   • Partial Match 1 Point - acured
   • Does not find reverse matches like dis or cur
4. Once all files have been searched, the results are sorted according to total score and outputed. Pretty simple huh?

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