Help:Search Terms

Revision as of 14:50, 25 February 2008 by imported>DragoonWraith (formatting)

"Search Terms" are words that a page ought to be searchable for, but for whatever reason the page is not showing up for that search. There are a number of reasons why this might happen; most notably, substrings do not return in searches. This means that, for example, GetItemCount might not come up in a search of "Item", because the search function does not check parts of words (in reality, it does because the word "item" is used in the description of the function).

However, this can be fixed by adding these words to the page. For the most part, if these words are not already in use it would probably be awkward to add them, so they are added behind the scenes with an HTML comment - like this:

<!-- Begin Search Terms
 banana
 elephant
 Sears
 End Search Terms -->

Now this page will show up in a search for "banana", "elephant", or "Sears". The <!-- and --> tags are the beginnings an end of the HTML comment, and the "Begin" and "End" notes are added to explain what the comment is being used for.

One of the most important places to add search terms is to each of the functions in the game. Because functions are all a single word, a Search Term list should be made for each one, with each part of the function name in it.

For example, GetItemCount would have this added to the top of the page:

<nowiki>
Blah blah, description begins here.

Now a search for "Get", "Item", or "Count" will return GetItemCount. Of course, once this project is completed, many other things will too, but it should make the Search function far more robust.