Search features

By default, all of your given terms have to appear in the ship name. Choose Search Full Citation beside the search box to widen that to the citations on each ship's page as well. When you do, your terms won't always be in the results listed, but are indeed present on the ship's page, in the text of one or more of the citations. Whichever you pick is remembered for your next search.

There are a number of different things you can do with the query. Here are a few examples:

You can perform a search that matches either of your terms by using the | symbol, such as Mary | Elizabeth

If you want to make sure a term does not match, you can use an exclamation point, as in Mary Elizabeth !Jane

You can create complex queries by grouping terms with parenthesis. (Mary | Elizabeth) & Queen

Rather than just matching single words, you can match phrases using quotes. "Queen Mary"

Use an asterisk for wildcard searching. Note that you need at least three sequential literal characters – you can't just search for "*". "Eliza*"

Quite often terms will match something in one of the citations, but if you don't want those matches returned, choose Search Ship Name beside the search box. For example Mary & Elizabeth searches ship names alone, while Mary & Elizabeth also looks through the citations on each ship's page.

To ensure that a certain number of your terms match (but not necessarily all) you can specify that number after a quoted set of terms with a slash. "Queen Mary Elizabeth"/2

Use either or both of "^" and "$" to specify that the term should be at the beginning of the matching field or the end of it, respectively. ^Mary Elizabeth$