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Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on MIGenWeb.net. Type in keywords or phrases in the search box. Choose what part of the site you want to search using the right hand drop down. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How To Use:

1. Type your keywords in the search box.
2. Select from the dropdown where you want to search a county or all of the project sites.
3. Press the Search button to start your search.

Here's an example:

1. Type oatmeal cookies in the search box.
2. 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

Search 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 John Smith, type "John Smith" 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 John-Smith instead of John Smith. The dashes link the names together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "john" will match the lowercase "john" and uppercase "JOHN".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like 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 the surname Hamp, try "Hamp -Hampton".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try Jen* to find Jenson, Jennie, Jenison or Jennifer.

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:

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:Elvis would find pages with Elvis in the title only.