Learn More About the Blues Search Engine
Search Rules
This search engine helps you find documents on this website and related sites. Here's how it works: you tell the search engine what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search engine responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.
How To Use:
- Type your keywords in the search box.
- Press the Search button to start your search.
Here's an example:
- Type blues artist in the search box.
- Press the Search button or press the enter key.
Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.
More Basics - An Overview
What is an Index?
Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages from around the world. The index becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.
What is a Word?
When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search engine needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.
What Is a Phrase?
You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.
Example #1: To find information on the Chicago Blues Festival, type "Chicago Blues Festival" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.
Example #2: Try searching for chicago-blues-festival instead of chicago blues festival. The dashes link the terms together as a phrase.
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Searches are case insensitive. Searching for Blues will match the lowercase blues and uppercase BLUES.
All searches are accent insensitive. Searching for a term with o will also match terms with õ.
Including or excluding words:
To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.
Example: To find pages of blues clubs in Germany but not in France, try blues clubs +germany -france.
Expand your search using wildcards (*):
By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.
Example: Try rock* to find rock, rocks, rocked, or rocking.
Searching for web addresses:
If your search term is an URL, like http://www.bluessearchengine.com/, some search engines will redirect you directly to the URL. To avoid this behavior, and do an actual search with the URL as the search term, enclose the URL in double-quotes ("http://www.bluessearchengine.com/").
Fancy Features for Typical Searches
You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the net:
link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring of it. Use link:microsoft.com to find all pages linking to Microsoft sites. Note: this feature is not implemented on all search engines.
text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in the body of the document. By way of comparison, searches without the "text:" attribute will scan the URL, title, links, and META tags as well as the document body.
title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:club would find pages with club in the title.
url:text
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:bluessearchengine to find all pages on all servers that have the word bluessearchengine in the host name, path, or filename - the complete URL, in other words.
Examples for Keywords/Search Terms
Try out several examples for searching with special keywords/search terms and click on the following link: Keyword Search