Display options. Your time is valuable and pursuing links to unfamiliar sites can be time consuming and frustrating, particularly when running on a normal modem. To help you evaluate unfamiliar links, you have the option of displaying information about what useful content you can expect to find if you follow a link to another site. Some comments include an "About" link, which when clicked will open an auxiliary window with an extended comment about a web site. Conversely when seeking familiar links, you have the option of displaying link titles only.
Alphabetic. You have the option of displaying the entire database contents alphabetically. Alternatively, when you know the first letter of a desired link, just click the letter. An entry like The Art & the Science of Writing Geoscience Reports is found under "A" for "Art," not "T." Letters lacking a single database entry are not encoded as links, so you won't get any of those annoying "Sorry, there aren't any ..." messages.
Topics. Any link can be assigned one or more topics to facilitate retrieving links by category. On the form, merely selecting a topic from the drop-down list activates the search. You can use topics "glossary," "style guide," and "jobs" to quickly display all the external links on the Glossaries & DBs, Style Guides, and Job Bank pages respectively.
Search. Enter a single term, or fraction thereof, then click Go. The search is case insensitive and comprehensive -- covering title, comment, topics, and keywords. It only excludes an "About" document. (Tip: faster than grabbing the mouse to click Go is to keep your hands on the keyboard, hitting the Tab key then the Enter key.)
Keywords. The search capability is augmented by hidden keywords attached to any link. To see one effective use of keywords, enter any state name (a single word, so use something like "Carol" not "North Carolina," although "north" will work too). The link to the Home Page for Association of American State Geologists -- which has links to all the state surveys -- should come up as a hit. I could use your help in beefing up this feature. If you have a favorite search term and one of our relevant links doesn't come up when you use it, please let me know and I will add the term as a hidden keyword for that particular link.
Special words. Search is also augmented by the following few special words, which are embedded as keywords if they don't already appear in a link title, topic, or comment: