Helpfile for the AACHENBREED Search Engine

We are constantly updating the database of Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine, however, the option to search in websites by language is foreseen, but is not activated yet.

Our Archive is divided into two parts and has on this moment about 7,660 websites in the Simple Search option.
Attention: The Extended Search option is not active today...

Searching

To search, go to the Aachenbreed Simple Search form, enter the desired keyword(s) and click the Search button. Simple Search will search only in the first Homepage of the 7,660 indexed Websites; selecting the option -Aachenbreed Extended Search form will...well..eh.. search all webpages, so including the first homepage of every registered website and any page that may have been visited by our web-crawler. (...Extended Search is not active on this moment)

The Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine will return a list of relevant pages, including their URLs. Clicking the URL would connect you to the actual page containing the desired word(s).

The Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine makes the indexes of Web sites the robot builds available to search. You can, for example, locate all the pages that contain the words "Greatest" or "unbelievable", if someone indexed a Wayne Gretzky site. Pages matching the search criteria are presented as hyperlinks on the results page so you can go immediately to what you are looking for. There are many options for both the search page and results page. This section explains those options and presents some strategies to help search the Aachenbreed indexes in the most efficient manner.

Basic Searches

When you enter a single word in the search keywords field and click the Search button, Aachenbreed Search Engine will look into it's indices for the word. If it is found the corresponding list of pages that contain that word is returned as the search results. This is the most basic type of search (and often very productive).

Boolean Searches

If you enter more than one word to search for, the Aachenbreed Search Engine will apply Boolean (and/or) logic to determine what pages match your search.

Selecting "all" in the "Find pages with" popup menu performs a Boolean AND search if more than one word is provided to search with. A search using the words "Gretzky Great One" is essentially looking for "Gretzky" AND "Great" AND "One" on the same page. Only pages that contain all the search words are returned.

Selecting "any" in the "Find pages with" popup menu performs a Boolean OR search if more than one word is provided to search with. Any page with at least one of the search words will be returned.

AND searching ("all") will usually return a smaller list of pages found. OR searching ("any"), especially with a lot of keywords in the search string, can produce a much larger number of pages found.

Number of Results Returned

The second popup menu in the "Find pages with" part of the search form is used to set a maximum number of found pages to return on each results page. This prevents a search that finds several hundred or thousand pages from creating a very large results page. On pages that show only the first selection of pages found there is a link to get the next selection. For example, if searching for "Wayne" finds 99 pages with the return number set to 10 then the first results page will show pages 1 through 10 and there will be a button to get the next 10 in the selection (11 through 20), and so forth.

Detailed Results

This check box allows you to select the amount of information displayed for each page returned by the search. See the "Search Results" section below.

Begins With Searching

Selecting the "Begins With Searching" option performs a basic wild card search. The index is searched for words that start with each search term. For example, entering the word "goal" will find pages with "goal", "goalie", "goalkeeper", "goalpost", etc.

Search Results

The top of the results page from a search shows the words used in the search and the number of pages found. If more pages are found than the maximum to display, the number of pages listed is displayed along with the total number found:

Searching for "Gretzky" found 99 pages and returned 1 through 10.

The result information for each page found by a search displays the following information:

• Relevance of page
• HTML Title (or file name if no title is present)
• Size of the page
• Date the page was last modified
• A "new" indicator if the page was new or modified since the last Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine indexing
• The first 250 characters found on the page
• The full URL to the page

Search results are always sorted by relevance (the most relevant first). Relevance is based on the number of occurrences and positioning of words as they appear in each document. For example, words in the HTML TITLE tag are weighted heavier than words that are contained in the body of the page. The Robot gives increased weight to words occurring in the title, meta keywords tag, headings and hypertext links.

The most relevant page is displayed showing 100% relevance. Each additional page displays relevance to the most relevant page. For example, if the most relevant page scored a 20 and the next page scored 16, the second page would display a relevance of 80%.

If the Detailed Results option is not selected, only the relevance, title, file size and New indicator are displayed for each page.

Finding Similar Pages

When detailed results are returned from a search, each page listed has an option to "Find similar pages". Each page indexed by the Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine contains a summary string of words most represented on the page. Clicking the "Find similar pages" link for a page will make the Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine find pages similar to the selected page, by performing a new search for the most relevant words in the selected page.

Search Tips

Numbers
Numbers indexing are turned off in Aachenbreed. Turning numbers off made the Aachenbreed indexes smaller. It may, therefore, not be possible to search for numbers appearing in a document.

Noise Words
Aachenbreed does not include common words such as "also", "been" and "there" in the index. These words are ignored when searching. If one or more is used in a search a message will be displayed on the results page indicating which words were noise words.

Punctuation
Some punctuation characters within words are indexed. This makes it possible to search for words like "CD-ROM" or "Version 2.5". Apostrophes, such as in contractions like "don't", are not indexed.
The characters $ and - are indexed when they appear at the beginning of words. Characters , . / - and $ are indexed when they appear inside a word. Punctuation at the end of words is never indexed.
When searching, you may need to try several possible combinations of a word containing punctuation. A word such as "e-mail", which is not consistently hyphenated, is one example.

Accented Characters
Aachenbreed Horse Search Engine supports special characters with ISO Latin encoding, however, it does not index characters with accent marks. Accented characters are indexed without the accent. It also converts HTML entities into the base character for inclusion in the index.

It is important to note that for searching the following characters are all considered equal:

e, E, é (é), É (É), ë (ë), etc.

So a search for "Café" will also find "Cafe", "CAFE", "Cafë", etc. Searching for "Café" will not work.