Search Help

We've worked very hard on the navigation options available on the PC Technology Guide, but we've also made search support available to site visitors. An overview of the different search options is provided here.

Main Site Search

The search box found to the top right of each screen offers a number of options for searching the PCTechGuide website.

• PCTechGuide
• Web
• Site (FreeFind)
• PCTG Forums
• Glossary

PCTechGuide

The default search, this will use the Google engine to search the site. The term entered will be searched for through the entire PCTechGuide site, including the forums, and glossary.

Web

Simply, through this option you can perform a search of the Internet using the power of Google.

Site (FreeFind)

This alternate PCTechGuide site search is provided by the excellent FreeFind search engine. Where the default Google search incorporates the entire site, the FreeFind search excludes the forums and glossary from results, so searches are targetted to the site's main content. It's also the most up to date of the search engines available on the site, because where Google may have some delay in indexing the site, at the click of a button we can instruct the FreeFind spiders to index any new content or updates to the site immediately. We highly recommend this service for webmasters looking to have a search facility on their site.

Forums

This search is focussed to results from the PCTechGuide forums. You can get more help on the forums search on the results page.

Glossary

Choosing this option will search the PCTechGuide's glossary for term definitions. If necessary, you'll find that there are further options when searching the glossary.

• "Match word" (the default) produces results in which the specified string appears as a discrete word in the matching terms. So, a search for "RAM" will list all glossary items containing the word "RAM", including "CMOS RAM," "RAM Disk" and "Tag RAM", as well as the entry for "RAM" itself.
• "Exact match" locates terms that match the specified string exactly, so in this case searching for "RAM" would only produce the result "RAM."
• a "Substring" search locates all terms that include the specified string anywhere within them. So, with this method, a search for "RAM" will produce results that include words such as "frame" and "program". Since this is the most free of the search options, it will sometimes produce too many results for the search to be meaningful, in which event you will be asked to try again using an alternative search method.

The results page offers each of the following further search options as clickable buttons for the term just searched:

• of the entire site, using FreeFind
• of the PCTechGuide Forums
• of the entire web, using the Google Search Engine.

The glossary is an important feature of the PC Technology Guide, using hyperlinking to interconnect with the rest of the site. The glossary categories are closely allied to the organisation of the site's guide categories, so browsing through the category terms you'll find that you can click links back into the guides to see the term used in a guide context.