The Online Archive of Terry's Texas Rangers
Sharing & preserving the history of the 8th Texas Cavalry Regiment, 1861-1865
The Online Archive of Google Search Tips
The key to utilizing Google (as well as many other Internet search engines) is to understand that they are an index, not a table of contents, they take you to pages where your search term(s) appear not necessarily to pages about those terms. For example, say I do a search for Google will bring up every page that has both the word "Texas" and the word "Rangers" on it. The words can be several paragraphs apart as long as they both appear on the same page. This can be quite a list and will include pages about the Texas Lone Ranger's fan club, Airborne Rangers with addresses in Texas, pages about Texans who drive Ford Rangers, as well as a multitude of other pages that will be of little use in my search. You could try plodding through the thousands of pages in hopes of finding the ones you that will be of use to you or you can try modifying your search. The first thing I would do is try my search again, this time using quotation marks. Placing my terms in quotation marks tells Google to look for pages where the phrase appears rather than just the individual words. By searching for instead of Google will only list pages on which the phrase appears. I still get quite a list but we are getting a little closer. Next, I would try refining my terms or use multiple search terms and phrases. With Google you can list a series of terms or phrases to search for. As with individual words Google will search for pages that contain all my search terms or phrases regardless of order or proximity. For example, I might try searching for or or even .