How to Search the Town Reports

Words to Search. You can enter up to six words in the input box. If certain terms are more important to your search, put them first. Words should only contain letters - no numbers or punctuation marks. The only exception is an apostrophe in proper names like O'Brien. Case does not matter. If you enter a singular or plural form, the results will be the same. If you include a word that is not in the index, the results page will show that in red, and that word is ignored.

No "and" or "or". Don't use "and" or "or" between your search terms. The normal search process "ors" the terms together. You will get back pages that contain any of the terms. If you want "and" behavior, where you only see pages that conatin each of your terms, check the "match all" option.

Adjacency. The search does not consider "adjacency" - whether words occur next to each other. Searching for Caroline Perry will give you all the pages that include Caroline along with all the pages that include Perry. The actual phrase "Caroline Perry" may occur, but the index doesn't know. Choose the match all option to see only pages that contain both Caroline and Perry.

Results. If your terms are in the index, you will get a list of links to pages that match, ranked by relevance. Relavance is based on the frequency of a word throughout the archive, compared to it's frequency in a particular page. If it is infrequent overall, but frequent in a page, that page will be higher in relevance. If a word is ealrier in your inpu, it will have more relevance.

Linked Pages. Each link in the result list will take you to a web-page holding an image of the document page. The index doesn't know where on the page the word is, so there are no highlighted terms. Each web-page has navigation to let you browse through the other pages in that document, as well as go to the other control pages on this site. If you want to look at a different page from your result list, use your browser's back button to return to your results list.

Modifying a Search. The results page shows the search pharses you are looking for. It also lets you modfiy the terms and choose some narrowing options and submit your search again. You can limit the results to only Selectmen's reports or School Committee reports. You can also limit the rsults ot a range of years.

How the Search Index is Built. Each page from the Town Reports was scanned and processed with character recognition software. All the recognized words that are dictionary entries or proper names of people ort places were tabulated. Excluding simple articles and prepositions, any word that occurred at least three times was included in the search index. Certain words with fewer occurrences were also indexed. You can go here to see a list of approximately 3500 words that are included in the index. You can go here to see a list of all the infrequent words, approximately 3800, that are not included.