The search engine provides the ability to search the Write Company Plus website based on keywords. The search engine feature can be invoked by entering the search argument(s) and clicking on the Submit button.

 

The results will appear on the next screen and below another dialogue box. The search results are listed with the most likely matches shown first and a numerical score indicating the relevance of each match. The matching word(s) in the found text is highlighted in yellow. You can elect to sort the results in date sequence. The new dialogue box enables you to perform another search. For this dialogue box you can refine your search by selecting a radial button to match on any occurrence of the search word(s) or to match of all search words. Whenever you find what you are looking for, simply click on the link for the result and you’re there.

 

A significant feature of the engine is that it can search within PDF’s and Word documents. Both of these file types contain lots of information on the website such as newsletters and published articles.  

 

By the default the engine searches for all occurrences of each word in the search argument. This is considered searching by any word. You can search for an exact phrase by enclosing the text in double quotes. An example will help to illustrate the benefits of the search engine. 

Let’s say several months ago you recall reading a Write View article that mentioned President Obama. You could go to the Write View page of the website and look at the titles. The article, entitled How to Learn from the Politics, looks promising. But, when opening the full article, you realize that it was not the one you were seeking. You could continue this hit’n’miss, time-consuming approach until the correct article was found. A better method would be to use the search webpage and search on Obama. In one search you found that the article, How to Speak Easy, appeared to be the one you were seeking and the brief excerpt from the article confirmed this fact.

Boolean expressions can also be used such as AND (words separated by a space or comma), OR (plus sign between words), and NOT (minus sign in front of a word). If you want the exact phrase to be searched, enclose the phrase in double quotes. For example, the search argument of nonverbal+communications would search for any occurrences of words, nonverbal and communications. Alternatively, "nonverbal communications" would find the exact phrase and more likely what you were seeking.

Have fun and good searching!