28 November 2007

Footnote's searches...

Footnote.com has improved its search. Unfortunately, there's a slight problem--at least for me.

I try and search for Samuel Rhodes. Footnote also includes Rhode in my search results, giving me numerous results for the state of Rhode Island, which I do not need.

I try and search for "Samuel Rhodes NOT Rhode" thinking that I will eliminate all the hits on Rhode Island. Unfortunately when I search using that approach, I get no results.

The database I was using was the Revolutionary War pension files at Footnote.com . I know there are results in there for Samuel Rhodes as I located them before the search changed. And now I can't find them without paging through every Rhode Island reference....

If I'm missing something, hopefully someone can enlighten me.

2 comments:

  1. It drives me nuts when search engines do that. I search for "Matthews" a lot and several search engines will return "Matthew". For you I would suggest adding either -"Rhode Island" or NOT "Rhode Island", whichever way they let you do it. Hopefully nothing you are looking for has Rhode Island in the document.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I added NOT "Rhode Island" to my search and it appeared to help. I really wish that NOT "rhode" would have done the same trick. Fortunately the guy I need was NOT in the state of Rhode Island. Michael

    ReplyDelete