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*** Veronica-2 Help: How to search

Veronica-2 contains listings of selectors and menu titles for many places in
Gopherspace. (IT'S NOT A FULL TEXT SEARCH -- neither was the original
Veronica.) This means anything that's a gopher menu title or in a gopher
menu title, as well as the selectors that fetch them, is fair game.

Veronica-2 runs on the in-house Textil search system, which implements
stemming, generalization and sophisticated sorting logic. Still, this
is no cure for a bad search query.

Typically, a few well-considered keywords will do the trick. Any selector
containing the keyword(s), or any display string that contains the keyword(s),
will be returned. The search is case insensitive. Textil implements stemming
support, so pieces of words can also match.

Veronica-2 returns 20 matches at a time, up to a maximum of 500. The "best"
matches are sorted to the top, typically those with the most keyword hits.
There is no specific provision for Boolean logic; the search server takes
care of that for you.

Things you SHOULD NOT search for:

* Common terms. For example, searching for 'gopher' is kind of
  dumb, since the majority of selectors have the word 'gopher' in them.
  Thus, looking for 'gopher clients' might not yield all that optimal
  of a search set, even though this type of query is actually specially
  optimized in this version of the crawler.

  Queries that require huge amounts of traversal in the database (invariably
  a query with a large number of really, really common terms) will actually
  get edited down to more specific keywords for you in order to keep things
  humming along and give you faster response time. However, the search
  engine may not have chosen the words you want to keep -- best to search
  smart to begin with.

* Punctuation marks are generally not helpful. For example, do NOT use

        * hyphens
        * wildcards (like %, _, * and ?)
        * slashes

  The old Veronica-ism of using wildcards is NOT NECESSARY! DON'T USE THEM!

  If you're looking for something like "hyde-white", looking for "hyde white"
  will usually have the intended effect.

* Remember: Boolean logic terms are not needed!

* Remember: Veronica-2 is NOT A FULL TEXT SEARCH. Specific phrases WITHIN a
  document are not indexed, and the CONTENT of a document is not indexed
  either!

Things you SHOULD search for:

* Parts of words are more helpful than a whole word if you don't know
  the exact wording of what you're after. For example, 'busses' gets
  much more restrictive matches than 'bus' (but you can always enter a
  search for 'busses' if that's specifically what you want, of course).
  While there is stemming support in the searcher, it might not help you.

* Do try to spell correctly; because of previous problems with it (in
  particular since it only worked well for English), there is no more
  phonetic matching technology in this version. Spelling does count!

<end of help>

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