Chapter 4. Searching with Alkaline

Table of Contents
Simple Search
Boolean Search
Meta Data Search
Numeric Data Search
Returning all pages
Restricting Search Scope
Restricting Date Scope
Forcing Search Options
Hints and Techniques

Simple Search

The Alkaline search engine finds documents on an internet site, several unrelated internet sites or an intranet domain. To search for any information you have to type in a sequence of words that define what you are looking for. The search engine will output a list of results, best results first. Alkaline searches exact words and word heuristics (parts of words) only. It does not do fuzzy or misspelled words search. Alkaline does not search phrases (yet).

A simple search is done by typing a word. Searching for light will find all pages containing light , light ning, delight ed, etc. It will also find pages with Light and Light ning because searching is case-insensitive by default.

Searching multiple words is done by typing a sequence of words separated by spaces. Searching for ricky blue will find all pages containing Ricky , tricky , blue , blue s, etc. Pages containing both words will be shown first in the results. Pages with these two words in the title or in meta tags will be more relevant.

Case-sensitive search can be enabled by using a single capital letter inside a word. For example, searching for Intranet let will find all pages containing Intranet and let ter, but will not list pages with just intranet . Case-sensitivity applies to the word with capital characters only.

Entire words can be searched by using quotes. Searching for "net" will find pages containing net and Net , searching for "Net" will of course find only pages containing Net because of the capital N enabling the case-sensitive search.