Abbot's Place

Performing an Indexed Search

If you're searching for something that is very common, you may get more information back than you want or need. For example, if you want to look for a group in California, "CA" might be your search term. Unfortunately, while "CA" is the abbreviation for California, it also appears in many words. So you might also get results for the "Capitol Area BDSM" group in Washington, D.C.!

To restrict your results, you can perform an indexed search. Select an Index from the drop-down menu [A]. Setting up a searchThen, instead of clicking Search All, either click Search Index [B] or simply hit <Enter> after typing your search term. This will restrict your search to the field you selected with the drop-down menu.

Note: When performing an indexed search, only exact matches (ignoring case) are returned. "Calif" won't match "California," for example. Also, the database engine doesn't allow searching this way for anything containing spaces; even if a match exists, it won't tell you. Because of these constraints, indexed searching can be a bit tricky. In general, you should only use indexed searches when simple searches take too long or return too many results.

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