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1. Quick-search
At the very top, right-hand side of our site you'll see our Google "quick search" - this is the quickest and easiest way to start searching for something on the site. Simply enter what your looking for in that box and press the "search" button.
(There is also an "Advanced Search" facility which we'll take a look at just shortly.)
2. Quick search results
The results for your quick-search are displayed on a seperate page - take a look at the results and choose the most appropriate result for your search.
3. Advanced Search
If you don't find what you're looking for using the quick-search, you can also use our own in-built search facility which is a great deal more powerful than the quick search and offers many more options. The advanced search link can be found at the top of any page, within the sub-menu as pointed out in step 1. When you hit that link, you will be searching within the downloads section on our site - we'll show you how to search other area's just shortly.
To begin searching using the advanced search facility, enter what you are looking for as shown in the screenshot below. You can choose to search in both the title and content or just one or the other. FreewareBB also use tags for most of our content which is always being updated. This means, for example, a listing for something like "Mozilla Firefox" could have tags such as "browser", "firefox", "mozilla", and so on. Entering a keyword in the "Find tags" field would return a list of all those listings with your chosen keyword. Normally, we wouldn't really recommend attempting an important search using tags as it can often be a tad misleading.
You can further narrow down your search by searching for the person who submitted a download or forum post by entering the persons name in the "Find author" field. Similarly, if you only want to search for content that was added within a specific timeframe, then you can enter the start and end date within the "Find by date" fields.
4. Advanced Search - other area's
When you first go to the "advanced search" facility, you will automatically be searching within our downloads. But if you scroll down the page a little, you will find other area's you can search in, such as "Forums", "Members", "Help Files", "Blogs" and so on. So, for example, if you wanted to search within our forums for the keywords "mozilla firefox" you would simply enter those words in the "Find words" field and then change the "Search in section" to "Forums". This is handy if you want to search for a discussion that may have happened on something like firefox, or any other keyword of your choice.
5. Advanced Search - more options
As you go further down the advanced search page you'll see even more options available to narrow down your search such as the category you wish to search in, or alternatively leave that at default to search within them all. Similarly, those options will change as you change where you want to search. For example, if you choose to search in the "forums", the list available would change to our list of available forums. Remember, by default, the advanced search facility will be set to search the downloads on our site so if you want to search somewhere else, you'll have to remember to change the "Search in section" as in step 4 above.
In our example below, we're still searching the download section so we'll continue explaining the options as they are shown in the screenshot. You can enter an operating system in the "Will run on" field to return only a listing of those OS's, such as "xp" for windows xp, "2000", for windows 2000, "7" for windows 7 or the likes of "linux", "mac" and so on. Selecting the "License" type from the drop down will return only those results that match your selection, so if you chose "Private and Commercial Use" your search would only return those downloads we have found to be allowed to run on both private and commercial environments.
Finally, the "Seach In" option will simply search our database of downloads, if left at default, but if you choose "Comments", the keyword or phrase you entered in the "Find Words" field at the beginning will be used to search all the comments within the downloads.
Please feel free to experiment on any of the filters within the advanced search facility - you may just be surprised at how detailed you can make your search and the results that follow!!. For now, anyone is welcome to reply to this tutorial with additional questions regarding the search features within FreewareBB where I'll be more than happy to answer
Regards
Marko
