TRAIL Search Tips & Help
Search Operators
The search engine default search is a Boolean
and
search; the web pages found will contain all the terms in your search.
When you wish to exclude a certain term, use the Boolean
not
operator or place a
minus
sign before a term. Examples:
- Searching "dogs cats" (or "dogs and cats") yields
pages with both terms
- Searching "dogs -cats" (or "dogs not cats") yields
pages with the term
dogs
but not
cats
Interpreting Search Results
The search results page provides only one citation per web
host address. The exact information you're seeking may be on a different
page than the one cited in the results. Click on the
more from
link to see additional pages from a single web site that matched your
term(s).
An alternative approach is to click on the link in the results
page that is very close to your desired information, and then navigate
within the archived site to other archived pages that supply the information
you need.
Limitations of Search Results
There are inherent difficulties harvesting Java-based or
menu-driven web sites. The harvester captures "clickable" links,
so sub-pages usually are not available by clicking an archived page's
drop-down menu. However, if the web site has a clickable link to the sub-page,
it is highly likely that the sub-page has been harvested. The sub-page
often can be found by clicking the
more from
link
on the results page, or by returning to the TRAIL main page and searching
again for key words that are applicable to the sub-page.
The harvester cannot access any web site that is protected
by a "robots.txt" file that excludes crawling and indexing services.
There is a low rate of incidence of "robots.txt" in the Texas
government, but it does occur. A future phase of the TRAIL project will
address asking agencies to make an exception to allow our harvester to
capture their sites.
Other limitations that have appeared include: clicking on
a menu-driven link sends the browser to the "live" site rather
than to an archived page; and, occasional incidents of unharvested content
due to the crawler erroneously identifying a sub-page as "out-of-scope."
Getting to "Live" Web Sites
For the present, users have direct access to the archived
web pages only. To visit an agency's "live" site, from the Archive-It
results page, you may copy the web address for the found page and paste
it into your browser's navigation bar. In a future enhancement to the
TRAIL service, users will have an option to visit the state agency's "live"
web pages directly.
For More Help
If you don't locate the resource you are searching, send
email to
reference.desk@tsl.state.tx.us
for further assistance.
List of Texas State Agencies
In addition to searching, TRAIL also provides basic information
about state government agencies on its
agency
locator pages
.
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