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A central search function for the entire Virtual Archives website is still under construction, but you may use this page to conduct a search of the first three sections: Westchester County and the Civil War; the Bronx River Parkway Reservation HAER; and, the Historical Treasures of Westchester County.
Search tools are also available on each of the other two sections: The Army’s Century on Davids Island and The Hudson River: A Voyage Through Time.
The following helpful
guide explains the search syntax on the web site which uses Google's
search service:
To enter
a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key
or click the Search button for a list of relevant results. This
westchestergov.com's Google search uses sophisticated text-matching
techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant
to your search.
A single spelling
suggestion is returned with the results for queries where the
spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.
Synonyms
are other words that have the same or similar meanings. They
are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the results
page.
By
default, this search service only returns pages that include
all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between
terms. For example, to search for information about hiking
and biking trailways, enter:
To broaden or restrict
the search, include fewer or more terms.
This
search service supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages
that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between
terms. For example, to search for services for seniors or housing,
enter:
Every search
result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display
how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the
excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that
you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want
to visit.
Searches on
this site are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless
of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example,
searches for "george washington," "George Washington," and "George
washington" all return the same results.
You
can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed
in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned
documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful
when searching for famous sayings or specific names.
Google
ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These
include most pronouns and articles. Google automatically disregards
such terms as (where, how, this, the) as well as
certain single digits and single letters (a). These terms rarely
help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching.
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The
Basic Search