Normal Search
The normal search does a literal match for one or more terms. For example,
whiskey xray
will find pages with "whiskey" and/or "xray" in them. If you quote several words ("whiskey xray"), they will be searched for together as a phrase. So
uniform "kilo bravo"
will find pages with "uniform" and/or "kilo bravo" in them. The results are ranked by the number of hits, but pages which contain ALL terms are favored. So if you search for
Bob Doug
a page which contains "bob" twice and "doug" once will rank higher than a page containing "bob" a hundred times but no doug.
Regular Expression
These are "perl style" regular expressions (which are almost identical to POSIX "grep" regular expressions). For example:
\bAmerican\b
will match "American" as a discrete word -- it will NOT match "Americana" or "Americanism" (but it will match "Pan-american"). You can find a quick reference to perl regexps here. You will be warned if your regexp is invalid. Regular expression searches only match one "term", but you can use the regexp "or" symbol:
Bob|Doug
matches bob or doug, just as
(do|d)ug
matches doug or dug (so does "do?ug").
Please send questions, bug reports, etc. about the site-search to: halfcountplus at intergate dot com