Doing a Search

In this post, I will discuss the following indices, all except Google being dedicated to railroad/railway subjects:

• Rod Railroad Directory
• The reincarnated Kalmbach index
• The new NMRA index
• Google

There are various ways that search engines accept and process what you place in the search box. First, this is what happens when you search for a single word:

• Rods Railroad Directory uses a simple proprietary search engine which will return any item containing the word, or a word starting with you input ("box" gets items with "boxcar" or "boxes" or "boxcab"). That's an implied wildcard.
• Kalmbach does the same.
• The NMRA returns only items which contain the exact word.
• Google uses a very sohpisticated search engine, which will return items containing the word, or variations of the word, or similar sounding words.

Now, add another word to the search box:

• Rods Railroad Directory uses an implied "AND". If you search for "passenger depot" or "depot passenger", you will be shown only items containing both words. Adding subsequent words NEVER increases the number of items returned. I call that "narrowing the search".
• Kalmbach does the same.
• The NMRA index you have to think about. It is not nearly as simple. It defaults to an "implied OR" scheme. If you search for "nyc boxcar", you get everything with "nyc" and everything with "boxcar" intermingled. Adding another word will give you a longer list to sort through. If you want only items containing both "nyc" and "boxcar", you have to put "AND" (uppercase required) between them.
  
  You can search for consecutive exact words by putting them in quotes. "norfolk southern" will get all items containing that phrase.
• Google is, once again, extremely sophisticated in its approach. It appears to return an "implied AND" list, followed by an "implied OR" list. Adding another word to your search usually gets you a longer list. It can be quite confusing to scan through.

Now, let's assume you want to find all NYC items, except boxcars:

• In Rods Railroad directory, search for "nyc -boxcar". The hyphen appended to the front of the second word says to ignore any items containing this word.
• The Kalmbach appears to have no facility for this.
• In the NMRA index, you preceed the unwanted word with "NOT".
• I will not try to figure out Google. A search for "nyc boxcar" returned about 42,000 itms. Using their advanced search page and specifying to leave out items with "boxcar", it returned a list of about 239,000,000 items. In the search box, it had placed "nyc -boxcar". With the exclusion, I expeced less on the second search.

So there you are. Choose your own poison.

Rod Goodwin
indexguy