The Wren's Nest Tavern's Search Engine

Search the Archives Wrenfirth

You can utilize the new, improved, and much faster way to search for topics of interest in the above box. There are three distinct searches you can make, or now you can search them all at once. You might also find the basic outline of the Wren's Nest itself helpful.

Full instructions for searching syntax and options are available below. The most important thing to remember about searching for things is that spelling counts!

Just the Wren's Nest Tavern: This will select only the material housed here at the Wren's Nest. This includes the News articles, Book of Heroes, Commentary, everything in the Library, and a few other resources included here.
Just Other Sites: Extensive indexing of the pages from about a dozen high quality sites of the Realms are included here, along with the more general keywords of the Tour Desk Listings.
The Books of the Realms: Xibar's Roost hosts a very complete Elanthian Library Archive of all the various books of the Realms found in the Libraries of the Provinces. This is a search engine of just those books.

Full Text Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on this website and related sites. Here's how it works: you tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How To Use:

Type your keywords in the search box.
Press the Search button to start your search.

Here's an example:

Type forging tips in the search box.
Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
The Results page will show you numerous pages for forging tips.
Change the first drop down box to say Any, and click the Search button again.
Instead of the search results finding pages with both the words forging and tips, it will return a list of pages with either word in them. See what a large difference in the returned value this one little change between ANY and ALL makes?

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

More Basics - An Overview

Here's a quick overview of the rest of our Basic Help. Just click on the links to jump to these sections.

What is an 'Index'?
What is a word?
What is a phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Fancy Features for Typical Searches

What is an Index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages about DragonRealms from numerous high quality web sites. The 'index' becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use this search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.

What is a word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: To find the prophecy by the mirror wraith, type "mirror wraith" (with the quotes!) in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for breath-of-the-dragon instead of breath of the dragon. The dashes link the words together as a phrase, one search term, instead of many. When considering small common words like of, and the, this can be especially important, because the search service does not index them for consideration in a search.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

All searches are case insensitive. Searching for Weapon will match the lowercase weapon and uppercase WEAPON.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find out about healing herbs without using alchemy, try: healing herbs -alchemy

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: Try wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy. In the last search, you could widen your options by trying: heal* herb* -alchemy

Fancy Features for Typical Searches You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the net:
link:address Not Implemented that I can figure out. -Dreamheart	Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring of it. Use link:microsoft.com to find all pages linking to Microsoft sites. Note: this feature is not implemented on all search engines.
text:text	Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:verbs would find all pages with the term verbs in them.
title:text	Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:prophecy would find pages with prophecy in the title. (The title is defined as the name of the page that appears up in the top window bar of your browser, not as a title or headline on the page.)
url:text	Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:shorka to find all pages on all servers that have the word shorka in the host name, path, or filename - the complete URL, in other words.