Top 6 How do “Wild Card” Searching and “Browsing” work?
• If you are unsure of the spelling of a name to enter in the Search box, use Wild Card Searching. You can put in an asterisk (*) to represent a string of one or more uncertain letters. Thus searching for Eli*abeth will find Elisabeth and Elizabeth. • More than one asterisk can be used in the Search argument but this will slow the search process considerably. • If you want to Browse the list of names we store in our database, you cannot just enter an asterisk [*] in the Search box. However providing you include at least one letter in the search, you will see a list of ALL the names in the database, including variants, pet names, abbreviations, etc, containing that letter in the appropriate place. It may give you many thousand names and should only be used sparingly. It would be better to enter two or more initial letters of the part of the database you are interested in [e.g. El* will give all the names beginning “El”]. • NB You cannot use Wild Card/Browsing and Soundex [see next FAQ]
