Transformation Stories List: Power Search Help

The Power Search page has many options. It will let you search for lots of things. If you're not used to the things it's covering, it can also confuse the heck out of you. Reading this can help. Please let me know if you have questions that aren't covered by this page.

Before I get to the specific parts of the search page, a few general notes:

General Details

This section controls where to search, how much to find, and how much to tell you about it.

Searching on the entire entry

This section allows you to search for things when you don't care where they appear in the entry. For example, if you search for fox in this section, you'll find things stories with "Fox" in the title, stories written by George Fox, stories whose description mentions the word "fox", and so on.

Before you do a text-based search at all, check the rest of the Search page, to see if there are other ways of searching that might accomplish the same thing. For example, if you're searching for lycanthropy stories, searching for the word lycanthropy or werewolves will miss a lot of stories, because there are so many different words that can be used to talk about lycanthropy. You would be much better off going to the "Result is..." section of the search page, and choosing the "lycanthropy" option there; that will find all the lycanthropy stories in the list, regardless of what words are used to describe the lycanthropy.

You can expand the flexibility of your search a bit by using "wildcards". If you include a question mark in your search text, it will match any single letter or number. For example, if you search for ?ream, you'll find entries containing 'dream' or 'cream'.  If you include an asterisk (*) in your search text, it will match any number of letters or numbers, including zero; for example, if you search for were*s, you'll find entries containing 'werewolves' or 'werefoxes' or 'weres'. (But you won't find "were-wolves", because the "-" isn't a letter or a number.)

Searching on particular parts of the entry

As the name implies, this section lets you search based on particular pieces of information in each entry--for example, the title of the book or story, or the type of transformation involved.

If you specify things here as well as in the "Searching on the entire entry" section, the searches combine; for example, if you search for fox, and also choose "Result must contain LY", you'll only find lycanthropy stories that mention foxes (or that are written by people named Fox, or whatever).