Classical Authors Directory Search Help Instructions

The Classical Authors Directory has three steps to searching the Internet.

(Step One)

The Search Box: type in your keyword search.

(Step Two)
Search results from the Classical Authors Directory database are listed.

(Step Three)

Continue your search uses the words you already typed into the search box. Simply choose your favorite search engine and click.

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. One word search results are very effective using authors last name. Exact match search results are obtained using quotes i.e. "William Shakespeare."

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you search the internet. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Note on case sensitivity - only search words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "internet" will match "Internet", "INTERNET", and "InTerNet", while the search term "INTERNET" would match only links with INTERNET (in uppercase) in them.

Prefacing a search term with a "special" character can greatly help you to narrow your searches....

Symbol	Translation	Example	Usage
+ / and	Require this term	+internet	Will only display listings that contain the word "internet"
-	Forbid this term	-web or ... +internet -web	Will only display listings that DO NOT contain the word "web"
or	Prefer this term	+internet or web	This will find all listings containing "internet", and will rank those that also contain the word "web" a bit higher. (since web is "preferred")
" "	Exactly match this phrase	"Internet Help"	This will find all listing that contain the phrase "Internet Help". Note that using the quote marks forces the engine into a case-sensitive search.
*	Match anything	inter*	You can use the asterisk as a "wildcard" to match parts of a word. In our example, the search would return any listing with any word starting with "inter". The asterisk does have one limitation: it cannot span words - that is, the query "matarts" would not match the first sentence of this description - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three characters, so a search for "th" or "an*" would be ignored.