Help - Searching

The Search box in the top right hand corner of each page is a Drupal-provided facility, based on Lucene, that enables all GENUKI users (not just maintainers) to do case-insensitive searches on the displayed information content – not the HTML encoding - of all the current GENUKI implemantation pages, but not any pages that have yet to be converted from our previous static html format. (Note that only text that is in nodes' edit templates, not text that is dynamically added in, e.g. text from the Church Database inserted into parish pages, will be searched.)

Multiple search terms (complete words or phrases, i.e. groups of words surrounded by double quotes, such as "birth certificate") can be specified; at least one of these terms must have two or more characters.  (The search that is performed is an 'or' search that identifies pages containing any of the specified words or phrases. To do an 'and' search you must specify the AND in upper case. Thus a search specifying: 

    Clovelly AND "Herring Boats"

will only report pages that include both these terms.

It is possible to perform so-called wildcard searches. The single character wildcard search uses the '?' symbol - so to search for 'John' or 'Joan' use the search:

    Jo?n

To perform a multiple (zero or more) character wildcard search use the '*' symbol - thus the search: 

   Church*

will find 'Church', 'Churches', 'Churchyard', etc. (Both '?' and '*' can be used within a term, but cannot be used as the first character of a search, or within a phrase.)

The use of '-' before a term excludes pages that contain the term. Thus to search for pages that contain "Clovelly" but not the word "Sydney" or the phrase "Western Australia" use the query:

    Clovelly -Sydney -"Western Australia"

The resulting page of Search results includes a left hand column, the county filter, that shows the GENUKI sections, i.e. countries or counties, in which the obtained results have been found, and the numbers of such results.  This column can be used to restrict the displayed results to those from particular counties or counties. Once a given country or county has been selected as a filter,  further searches performed using the search box in the Search results page will be restricted to the selected country or county until the filter is disabled, which is done by clicking on the appropriate "(-)". 

The above outlines only some of the facilities that are provided by the Search box - more details can be found in the (rather opaque) Lucene query language documentation.

Note that, until the conversion to current GENUKI implemantation is completed, a quite separate Google-based search facility, that covers all of GENUKI, plus other sites providing UK genealogical information, is provided (to all users) by the link Search GENUKI+, just below the current GENUKI implemantation Search box.