Finding what you want

MyCA has the two familiar ways of finding things that books made standard: content lists and indexes. Content lists are the menus at the top of the page and down the left hand side: the indexes are the search boxes which provide automatic indexing to the site.

The menus at the top are the same on the Cruising, MyCA and MyCA Forums and give the top six links. The side menus are different on the open site and MyCA although some of the links on the open site point to items on MyCA particularly where the content is open to everyone (e.g. book reviews). The Forums don't have space for an left menu so you have to go via the top menus to where you want to go.

At the moment we have three different indexes which reflects the fact that we're using different methods in different parts of the site:

1. Search MyCA box on the left hand side of any MyCA page.
2. Search the forum which gives access to all posts by members there.
3. Google search on the "open" pages of the web site.

Let us look at those in turn

Search MyCA

Scroll down to the box, put in one or more words you want to search for and click on the Search MyCA button below the box and you will get a list of all the pages on MyCA that contain the words you are searching for, or some of those words.

This should find all the pages that you have access to, including members only material (which Google does not have access to). It prints the title and a few lines of each page including the words you are looking for in bold. To read the full version click on the title. Pages which only include one word out of several you have given are included further down the list.

Searching the forums

We've put a link to this search on the main MyCA page and when you click on it it brings up a rather more complicated search box which allows you to fill in separately keywords and authors. In the keyword section you need to use "and", "or" and "not"to link terms. For instance, to find "red diesel" you would put "red and diesel" in the box. In the author section you must use * if you aren't using the full name. e.g. "Fred*".

The result is a list of topics where the match may be anywhere within the topic. So don't be surprised if you search for an author and the topic gives a different author. You'll find the author you are looking for someway through the conversation.

Incidentally, the other two items in the box above are really browsing capabilities, not searches. We'll try and add to these capabilities soon.

Google Search

The Google search box is found on the front page of the open site, www.cruising.org.uk at top centre below the links for Sections and Shop. This searches all the publicly accessible pages on the site including MyCA. If you are used to Google then you should have no trouble with this.

Once you have received the first page, you will notice that the search page has the CA Logo on it and includes the same two options as on the search box. Namely you can either search just on the CA web site or on the whole web. Just select the appropriate option.

You may know that Google has special methods of presenting the most popular material first. This may or may not be what you are after, but you can use all the special methods that Google allows.