Search Tips

What to Search

There are two types of searching on this website. The Dilbert Strip Finder and the Web Site Content.

The search box on the side navigation bar every page will search the Dilbert Strip Finder.

If you want to search the web site content instead -- say for Pho Ottawa restaurants -- then select the "Search" button on the side navigation bar (with or without entering a search word), and then select the "Content" tab.

Here are some tips for the Dilber Strip Finder:

• Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT are not recognised. The search engine uses Natural Language mode.
• Not case sensitive.
• Wildcards (using the asterisk) are allowed except at the beginning of words. For exanple, meet* is allowed, but *ful will not work. (In this case, searching for *ful will instead search for ful)
• Search for individual dates using the formats YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYYMMDD. Wildcards are not available for dates.
• Most words are spelled with U.K. English instead of American English. Example: colour instead of color.
• Acronyms generally do not have periods. Examples: CEO, TV, PC, TBA, etc.

Results

• Search results are ranked by search engine relevance.
• Hover the mouse over the short book name to get the full book title. For example, hovering over "pumped" will show "Still Pumped from Using the Mouse."

Limitations

• Short words (3 characters or less) are not indexed.
• Words that occur in more than half the items are not indexed. The only word that this affects is "Dilbert," ironically enough.
• The search engine does not use word stemming. That means that, for example, drive and driving are different words and searches for one don't match the other. I'm working on fixing this.

More Information

The search engine is MySQL's full text search in natural language mode. The gory details are here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-natural-language.html