http://www.webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Help/Hints.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
The WebCrawler knows about a lot of documents, so it helps to precisely specify your search. Often, though, you can be too precise, so finding what you want may take a couple of tries. Here are some suggestions about what to do when you don't get what you want, and how to phrase your search in a way that will produce the best results.
Your search produces no results. Check your spelling! Many of the searches against WebCrawler produce no results because of misspelled words. If your spelling looks OK, then try to be less specific. For instance, the search "Travel to Crete, Naxos, and Ios in Greece" is too specific: no page matches it. On the other hand, a search for "Travel in Greece" produces an appropriate list of results.
Your search produces too many results. Be more specific, and make sure you are searching for all your search words. Try to think of words that uniquely identify what you're looking for. Some words are of little value, because they identify lots of documents in the WebCrawler's index. For instance, the words information and university together identify nearly half the documents in the index, so they're not very useful in trying to narrow down your search.
You get an error from the WebCrawler. The WebCrawler will return an unfriendly error message if it's too busy, or if it has a problem processing your query. If it repeatedly has trouble with your query, please let us know, as we are trying to eliminate these problems. You can email us at info@webcrawler.com. Thanks!
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