This search engine helps you find documents on birding related websites. 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. Click on "View with Highlighted Search Terms" to see a Surfbirder snapshot of the web page with your search words highlighted in yellow.

How To Use:

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

Here's an example:

1. Type recipe suet cakes in the search box.
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The Results page will show you numerous pages on the Web about recipes for suet cakes.
4. View with Highlighted Search Terms - In your results, click on this link to see a Surfbirder snapshot of the web page with your search terms highlighted in yellow.

Tip: As this search engine is focused on birds and birding websites, try and avoid using keywords such as birds or birding as thousands of results will be returned to you. 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 a Phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Fancy Features for Typical Searches

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: To find David Sibley references, type "david sibley" in the search box with the quotation marks. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ.

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 recipes for suet cakes, try "recipe suet +cakes".

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.

Searching for web addresses:

If your search term is a URL, like "http://www.surfbirds.com/", some search engines will redirect you directly to the URL. To avoid this behavior, and do an actual search with the URL as the search term, enclose the URL in double-quotes.

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:

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:brant would find all pages with the term brant 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:Jaegers would find pages with Jaegers in the title.

url:text
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:surfbirds to find all pages on all servers that have the word surfbirds in the host name, path, or filename - the complete URL, in other words.