Searching Hints
Tricks, Tips & Traps
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Adding the @LA Search to Your Site |
- @LA is a directory of web sites. Attempts to look for businesses without a web site, individuals, e-mail addresses, street addresses or phone numbers will be futile.
- You can use the search function to locate entries by topic, name, location, year, month or category. The searches are based on exact character matches to the full text of the name, description and category of the site as it is listed in @LA. @LA does not index the content of web sites.
- Wildcards are not used and are not necessary.
- The searches are case insensitive.
- You may include any character or symbol in your search expression.
- You may include up to a maximum of 3 words in your search criteria, delineated by spaces. All words are "ANDed" which means only matches that contain all of the words, regardless of order entered, will be returned. Do not try to search for "Hollywood Santa Monica", or you won't get many (or any) results (sites that are both in Hollywood and Santa Monica).
- If two or more words should be searched for as a unit and the order of the words is important, then you should enclose the words in "double quotes", (e.g. "ice cream", "north hollywood").
- Because of the way @LA categorizes its listings and the way our search engine works, you may significantly reduce the number of matches when you use double quotes. For example, a search of "golf courses" will return only those links that have these words in their name, whereas a search on golf courses would return all golf courses, regardless of name. Why? @LA lists golf courses are under the "Golf" category and the separate "courses" sub-category, therefore the words golf courses never "appear" together in our category listings.
- Leading, trailing and extra spaces are insignificant and are removed before the search begins. When using double quotes, embedded extra spaces are significant, so it is recommended that you use single spaces between words.
- By default, only complete words will be located. If you disable the "Whole Words Only" option, a partial search will be performed ... any words that contain the text in the search criteria will be returned. For example a partial search on "rain" will return "train", "rainbow" and "Crain".
- Because of the method used to search the directory, it is recommended that you do a partial search on plurals. Instead of "Companies", search for "Compan". Also try to remove suffixes and prefixes. For "Rental" use "Rent"; for "Copying", use "copy"; for "Dental" or "Dentist", use "Dent".
- If nothing is coming up, try different searches with alternate forms of the same word. For "employment", also try "job". For "movie", try "film" or "cinema". You may get different results with different words.
- If you don't get any results with multiple words, eliminate one word from your criteria. You may then be able to find what you are looking for or determine a better choice of words to use.
- URLs or parts of URLs are not searchable. Do not try looking for "www.xxx.com".
- Only a maximum of 50 items can be retrieved per search, in which case a random selection will be displayed. If you still didn't get what you need, please refine your search by adding one or more words, re-run the search for another random selection or ...
- Use the links provided with the search results to jump to other @LA pages that have additional listings which might be related to your search.
- @LA uses the following names for various regions, "West LA", "Mid-City", "citywide", "countywide", "LA", "L.A." (no spaces), "Downtown" (LA).
- @LA removes "Inc", "Co", "LTD", etc. from all company names, so don't include them in your search.
- You can search for an event by doing a partial search on the 3 letter month code.
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