Note that the search will normally look for a match on the complete word or phrase. If you want to search on a partial word append the partial word with an asterisk("*"). Thus "snow" will only match on the word "snow" but "snow*" will match on "snow", "snowing" and "snowsnake". Simple boolean AND searches are possible so, for example, "louise and piran" will search from items that contain both the word "louise" and the word "piran". It is not possible, at the moment, to combine both a partial search and a boolean search.
Documents stored on the site in HTML or PDF can be searched but text in scanned documents cannot be indexed and searched. This means in some of the older documents (predating the web site in 2001) will not be searched.
If the "Sort search results in descending date order" option is not checked search results will be sorted by a ranking determined by algorithms in the search routine. The website currently uses the Lucene search library. The Lucene default order of search results by ranking uses a combination of the Vector space model and the Boolean model for information retrieval ranking.
It is possible to use the powerful Google search algorithms to search the site. In the Google search box type site:www.ramblers.ab.ca followed by your search term.