NOTE: Currently, this search function does NOT search the HUBB. Please go HERE to search the HUBB separately.

Search Hints and Tips

This search engine helps you find documents on this website. With thousands of pages on the site, sometimes the easiest way is to use the search bar near the top of every page. In the HUBB, it's definitely the easiest! Just tell the search engine what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search engine will give 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.

NOTE: The search used here is based on an index that is rebuilt twice daily, so it may not have the very latest HUBB posts in it, but it is very quick, and has a lot of features such as relevancy weighting, shows extracts of the text including the words you were searching for and more.

How To Use:

Here's an example:

Tip: 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 an 'Index'?
What is a Word?
What is a Phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Fancy Features for Typical Searches

What is an Index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, hopefully well-organized collection of our Web pages and Bulletin Board pages posted by travellers around the world.

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search engine needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the website. You can separate words using spaces and tabs.

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 #1: To find out about border crossings, type "border crossing" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

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

All searches are accent insensitive as well. 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 pages for border crossings, but not into Guatemala, try "border crossing" -Guatemala.

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 motor*, to find motor, motors, motorcycle, motorcycles, motorbike, motorbikes, motorcycling and motorbiking.

Fancy Features for Typical Searches

You can search more than just text. You can also specify:

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:Thailand would find pages with Thailand in the title.