This is a mirror site for www.thuto.org/ubh. If you have any problems, try the main site. (For this page see http://www.thuto.org/ubh/search.htm.)
Search the UB History web-site |
This is a new service added to the UB History web-site in March 2000. If you have any comments or suggestions about it, please contact the Web-site Editor, Dr Bruce Bennett, email bennett@mopipi... [Click here for full email address].
The search engine for this site is provided by Atomz.com - a free service. The above is the "Advanced Search" form. On some pages you will find the "Simple Search" form instead.
Note that searches
can be refined by the use of the plus and minus ("+" and "-") operators.
Include a "+" to indicate that a word must be included,
and a "-" to indicate that you only want matches which
do not include the word. For example,
suppose you wish to find material on Khoesan langauges.
"+Khoesan +language"
will find matches including both words.
Now suppose that you wish to find material on Khoesan people
other than on language. To save having to look through the
material on language, you can enter
"Khoesan -language".
This will find matches for Khoesan which do
not include "language".
Note that with the Advanced search form, plus and minus can only be used with the "Any" option selected.
On some search forms, the option is included of specifying whether the whole site should be searched, or only a certain defined part of it. At present the only parts for which separate indexes has been compiled are the Electronic Texts folder and the computing resources pages. Suggestions for other sections to be indexed separately will be gratefully received.
Words entered in lower-case will match found words with any capitalization. Thus, "king" will find "king", "King", or "KING". But words including a capital will only find the word with the same capitalization. Thus, "King" will only find "King" and will not find "king" or "KING".
If a phrase is put in quotation markjs it will be searched for as a block; otherwise the words are searched for individually. Thus "King Khama" entered in quotation marks will only find the phrase "King Khama", whereas without quotes the search engine will look for pages containing the words "King" and "Khama" anywhere on the page.
Quotes are ignored if the Advanced Search Form "all" or "phrase" radio button is selected.
Plus and minus can be used with a phrase. Leave no space between the plus or minus and the quotation marks.
A field search is a search for a word in a particular part of a document. Field searches can be made:
NB: write the field name (e.g. "url:") in lower-case. There must be no space either before or after the colon.
For example, "title:courses" will only find documents which have the word "courses" in the document title. The ALT text is the "alternative text" which appears instead of an image if you have images switched off - it is therefore useful if you are searching for an image.
The "*" wildcard can be used. "*" represents any character or characters (including none at all). Thus, "defen*" will find "defence", "defense", "defend", etc. (As you will recognize, this is the same as the way the * is used in DOS for specifying multiple filenames.) Wildcards are useful when you are not sure what spelling is in use (e.g. to find "Khama","Kgama" "Khame" and "Kgame" you can enter "K*am*") and to find words which may appear in several forms (e.g. to find "nationalism" and "nationalists" you can enter "nationalis*").
See the Atomz.com page of Search Tips for further information.
The Google search engine includes a number of very powerful special features. One of these enables you to limit a search to particular domains. For example: suppose you want to do a search for "botswana history" but you only want results from British academic sites (e.g. you might be looking for who, in British universities, was doing Botswana history). You enter:
| botswana history site:ac.uk |
- i.e. "site:" (NB the colon) followed (with no space) by the right-hand part of a URL. This will return only results from sites like www.essex.ac.uk (Essex University) and www.cam.ac.uk (Cambridge University). If you had put "site:.uk" then any URL ending .uk would have qualified. If you had put "site:essex.ac.uk" then only pages from the essex.ac.uk site would have been found.
This means that you can search any site using Google. This is in fact sometimes better than using the site's own search engine. The main drawbacks are:
The cases where using Google is a good option include:
(As regards the third case: we have generally been pleased with the Atomz.com search engine. But occasionally its index seems to be incomplete on a particular occasion and people get inappropriate "Not found" responses.)
To search this site using Google, type the search terms into the
Google search box, followed by
site:thuto.org.
E.g. to search for "imperialism" enter
| imperialism site:thuto.org |
Copyright © 2000 University of Botswana History Department
Last updated 29 October 2002