Search Tips

The indexing on this site is by Atomz.com and provides greater flexibility than (say) Google. Not every part of every page is indexed, to allow more accurate search results.

Check spelling but don't use accents - Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. The search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar your search terms, but it is always best to spell the search terms correctly.
Accents are best ignored, with the sound-alike matching ticked. For example, consider searching for maps by Kümmerley + Frey. If sound-alike is off, searching on either "Kummerley" or "Kuemmerley" will not find pages containing the word "Kümmerley". However, be warned that sound-alike reads most proper nouns as if they were English words, eg. with a soft "w" in Hallwag, not the harder German one.

Use capitalisation for names - Use capitalisation when looking for proper nouns such as the name of a brand of petrol or a place. Lowercase words will match any words of any case. This is particularly helpful when looking for brands such as Total or National which are also common English words.

Use quotation marks around phrases - Use quotation marks to find words that must appear next to each other in a phrase. For example, if you are looking for the Danish company, search for "Hydro Texaco" within quotes rather than just Hydro Texaco, which would return all references to both Hydro and Texaco.

Use Boolean plus (+) or minus (-) operators - Precede a search term or phrase with a plus (+) sign to indicate it must appear in a search result. Precede a search term with a minus (-) sign to indicate an undesirable search term or phrase that must not appear in a search result. For example, searching for +Total -France will return results that are about the brand Total, but not about France.

Use field searches - Field searches allow you to search for words that appear in a specific part of a document such as the body text (body:), title text (title:), alt text (alt:), meta description (desc:), meta keywords (keys:) or URL (url:) <)>. The field name should include the colon and precede the search word or phrase with no spaces between them. For example, searching for title:Esso will find pages with Esso in the title of the page.
Alt text is only used in the names of images on this site, so a clever way of finding pages with images of (say) BP maps would be to carry out a search on alt:BP !

Good Luck and Have Fun!
If you really can't find something that you think ought to be on this site, then you can always send me an e-mail.