RATales Search

Search Rules

This search engine will help you to find the story you're looking for if it's in the RATales Archive. Type key words or phrases into the search box, select whether you want it to look for pages which contain all of your search terms (Match: All) or any one of them (Match: Any), then click on the Search button. You will be given a list of all the pages in the RATales Archive which relate to those topics, with the most relevant pages appearing at the top of your results. Each result will give up to three brief quotes from the page, to give you some context how and where your search terms appear.

Here's an example:

Type siberian gulag in the search box.
Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
The Results page will show you all of the pages in the RATales Archive that make reference to a certain facility in the Tunguska area, provided they happen to mention both words. You'll get a different set of results if you just search for gulag or for siberia.

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

More Basics - An Overview

Using Phrases:

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: To find phone conversations between Mulder and Scully (who appear as guest stars on Krycek's story archive because he's generous like that), type "mulder it's me" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for x-files instead of x files. The dashes link the words together as a phrase, and you won't get stories that feature X pulling a file out of his briefcase, when you're looking for a department within the FBI.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches:

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for Tunguska will match the lowercase "tunguska" and uppercase "TUNGUSKA".

Searches are also accent insensitive, so facade will also find "façade".

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find a story where Krycek interacts with Scully but Mulder isn't even mentioned, try +scully -mulder. And obviously, if you're an M/K slasher instead of a SKipper, the reverse will work as well. (You shouldn't need to specify Krycek himself, as the story wouldn't have been archived here if he didn't put in an appearance somewhere in it.)

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try wish* to find wish, wishes, or wishful.

Fancy Features for Typical Searches

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the net:

text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:trustno1 would find all pages with the term "trustno1" in them.

title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:krycek would find pages with "krycek" in the title.