AUE Web-Site Concordance Index

Help

To search for a word (hereinafter called the 'target word'), find an entry in the above index that is the highest in alphabetical order that is less than or equal to the target word.  Click on that entry.  This will bring up a concordance file that will contain the target word.  Search for the target word using your browser's search function.  (For example, in Internet Explorer or Netscape use control-F.)  If you prepend a colon to the target word, the search will skip all occurrences except the one that is a main entry.  The main entry for a target word in the concordance file will be followed by a list of hyperlinks, one for each search area (See footnote) that has at least one occurrence of the target word.  A number following each hyperlink indicates the number of occurrences of the target word in the search area represented by the hyperlink.  

For example, to search for the word 'machine', note the adjacent entries 'm' and 'mar' in the index.  The word 'machine' is alphabetically equal to or greater than 'm' and less than 'mar', so you should click on 'm'.

Each hyperlink in the Concordance is preceded by an italicized tag that stands for the program or the type of program that the link pertains to.  The following table shows some of the tags and the program or program type they correspond to.   Other tags should be self explanatory.

Some people may find Perlfect preferable because it has somewhat the feel of search engines like AltaVista.  It also allows phrases to be searched for as well as individual words.

Other people may find the Concordance preferable because it takes advantage of internal anchors in some files so that it goes more directly to the point where the search target is to be found.

The Concordance doesn't provide for searching on multiword phrases, but it usually happens that if you search for a word in the phrase, one of the hits has the phrase spelled out in its hyperlink.  To see what I mean, use the Concordance to look for 'rule of thumb' by searching on 'thumb'; or 'cut the mustard', by searching on 'mustard'.

A difference that may be significant to people with slower systems is that each time you select a segment of the Concordance, a file is temporarily downloaded to your site.  An effort has been made to keep the sizes of the segments small enough so that this download time would not be prohibitive.  Perlfect Search uses a single large index, but when it's used it's not downloaded from the remote Web site, so download time is not a problem.

In the allocation of the overall Concordance to the individual concordance files, the rule used was that no concordance file should exceed 50 kilobytes in size.  This is the reason for some letters of the alphabet having more partitions than others.  It also explains the uneven spacing of the partitions.  An exception to the 50-kilobyte rule is the 'Non-alpha' file, which contains entries that don't start with an alphabetic character.

The Perl script that generates the Concordance was written by Markus Laker.

Footnote: For small documents, 'search area' may mean the entire document.  For larger documents, 'search area' pertains to the interval between two target anchors.   'Target anchor' refers to an HTML anchor that has the string '