Overview

What is the Scuba Search Index?

The Scuba Search Index is a large, growing, organized collection of thousands and thousands of scuba-related web pages. The index becomes larger every day as people submit requests to add new sites via Scuba Search and its partner site ScubaLinx. In addition to the index pages of the many independent companies and organizations contained in the Select Sites sub-index, Scuba Search searches all pages contained in the ScubaLinx directories, all CDNN news pages, all Scuba Forum pages, all Cyber Diver pages and all pages contained in sponsor and advertiser sites. We also utilize technology that crawls the Web looking for pages that contain scuba-related information of interest to the global scuba diving community. When you use our search service, you search all Scuba Search sub-indexes, or one specific sub-index, using keywords or phrases.

Searching for a Specific 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 pages about caribbean dive resorts, type "caribbean dive resorts" 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 dive-boats instead of dive boats. The dash links the words together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Scuba" will match the lowercase "scuba" and uppercase "SCUBA".

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 about liveaboards in Thailand but not Malaysia, try "liveaboards +thailand -malaysia".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try safe* to find safe, safety, or safer.

Searching for web addresses:

If your search term is a URL, like "http://www.cdnn.info/", 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:

link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring of it. Use link:cyberdiver.net to find all pages linking to Cyber Diver sites. Note: this feature is not implemented on all search engines.

text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in the body of the document. By way of comparison, searches without the "text:" attribute will scan the URL, title, links, and META tags as well as the document body.

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:CDNN would find pages with CDNN in the title.

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