Using the Search Engine

SpiderLine externally powers the search engine. The “spider” crawls the website periodically and updates its database for words, terms, and phrases to develop search results. If the server for my website is having any difficulties before and during a crawl, though, sometimes the “spider” will not crawl, index, and follow one or more pages and the words, terms, and phrases are not indexed in the database. It works very well most of time, but occasionally you might type in a word, term, or phrase, and get no search result or very limited search results. As with any search engine, it has limits; but, generally it provides a fairly easy method to locate things on my chess website.

Tips for Searching

1. Using only one or two words is best. Do not use general words like check, checking, checkmate, checkmates, checkmating, mate, mates, mating, King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, or pawn, as you will generate a very large number of pages for a search result. The search engine finds pages with both capitalized and lower case versions of the words typed into the search text box. Also, the search engine uses a default Boolean search where a space between words equals “AND”, meaning the search engine will find pages where both words or however many words you decided to input and are able to type in the search text box, are located. However, if what you have searched for turns up too many pages, or not exactly what you are looking for, try limting your search or using a different search string. For example, in The Bishop tutorial I have a page which covers and details differences between Good Bishop and Bad Bishop, what is an Active Bishop, and the difference between Stronger Bishop and Weaker Bishop. Typing in Good Bishop, will locate a lot of pages where the words good and Bishop appear, but if you add in the words Bad Bishop (or Bad Bishop and Active Bishop), then that tutorial page will come up listed first in the search results as the highly recommended – numerous yellow stars one for you to choose as being the best choice.

2. If you want to locate ECO codes, this may be done either through linking from the Main Index page to the ECO List Section or you can use search engine. Type in the ECO code (e.g. A00) and do the search to bring up the pages where the code appears.

3. If you want to get search results for links to where (if at all) on my chess website you might find information pertaining to a particular player, e.g. Morphy, Anderssen, etc., then type the name as the search word. You can also add another word. For example, say you want to find references to Anderssen’s Evergreen game. Type in +Anderssen +Evergreen separated by a space (a Boolean search string). Morphy’s Mate…type in +Morphy + Mate separated by a space. You do not need to type in the apostrophe and the s (‘s), but may do so.

4. Throughout my chess site there are tutorials and problems dealing with a range of types of mates, attacks, strategy, tactics, notation, and terminology. For example, a Bishop-Knight mating combination. You could type in Bishop-Knight (use the hyphen) and search for pages where this term appears. Another way to search for terms and phrases is using Boolean search. For example to locate pages where the concept of Bishop Pair is discussed, then use the Boolean search string +Bishop +Pair in the search box.