AO Search has, inside its mechanism, a table of all of the words that appear in AO. If you type one of them, it will list all of the pages that contain that word. If you type two words, it will list all of the pages that contain both words. Capitalization does not matter in the words that you type: searching for "mitre", "MITRE", or "Mitre" will get you the same results.
If you end a word with an asterisk, as in "cathedr*" or "bisho*", then AO Search will look for all of the words that begin with those letters. AO Global Search also permits the use of Boolean expressions. See "Searching with Boolean expressions" for more information.
Normally search results are displayed in order of "relevance". The computation of relevance is inexact and we adjust it from time to time.
Some documents are fairly big; you may have to use the search capability in your browser to search within a document once AO Search has told you which document contains it. We are working on making the average size of an AO document be smaller, but it's slow going.
AO Search uses the ht://Dig software system, which is open-source software written originally by Andrew Scherpbier at San Diego State University.
If you have a comment about AO Search we'd like to hear it.
