African Crawler takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the "Cached" link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content African Crawler uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.

When the cached page is displayed, it will have a header at the top which serves as a reminder that this is not necessarily the most recent version of the page. Terms that match your query are highlighted on the cached version to make it easier for you to see why your page is relevant.

The "Cached" link will be missing for sites that have not been indexed, as well as for sites whose owners have requested we not cache their content.

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If African Crawler has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.

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You can also get a list of definitions by including the special operator "define:" with no space between it and the term you want defined. For example, the search [define:World Wide Web] will show you a list of definitions for "World Wide Web" gathered from various online sources.

African Crawler has expanded the number of non-HTML file types searched to 12 file formats. In addition to PDF documents, African Crawler now searches Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and others. The new file types will simply appear in African Crawler search results whenever they are relevant to the user query.

African Crawler also offers the user the ability to "View as HTML", allowing users to examine the contents of these file formats even if the corresponding application is not installed. The "View as HTML" option also allows users to avoid viruses which are sometimes carried in certain file formats.

Overall, the additional file types provide African Crawler users a wider view of the content available on the World Wide Web. And African Crawler has plans to keep expanding the range of file types available over time.

For more information about this feature, please read the file type FAQ.

If you prefer to see a particular set of results with a specific file type (for example, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box along with your search term(s).

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You may occasionally see small images at the top of your African Crawler search results. These are images that we think are relevant to your search terms.

You can also find relevant images by doing a African Crawler Image Search, or by adding words like 'pics' or 'pictures' to your search terms when you do a regular web search.

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When you click on the "Similar Pages" link for a search result, African Crawler automatically scouts the web for pages that are related to this result.

The Similar Pages feature can be used for many purposes. If you like a particular site's content, but wish it had more to say, Similar Pages can find sites with similar content with which you may be unfamiliar. If you are looking for product information, Similar Pages can find competitive information so you can make direct comparisons. If you are interested in researching a particular field, Similar Pages can help you find a large number of resources very quickly, without having to worry about selecting the right keywords.

The more specialized a page is, the fewer results African Crawler will be able to find for you. For example, Similar Pages may not be able to find related pages for your personal home page if it does not have enough information to authoritatively associate other pages with yours. Also, if companies use multiple URLs for their pages (such as company.com and www.company.com), Similar Pages may have little information on one URL, but lots on the other. In general, however, Similar Pages works well for the majority of web pages.

The word "site" followed by a colon enables you to restrict your search to a specific site. To do this, use the site:sampledomain.com syntax in the African Crawler search box. For example, to find admission information on Stanford's site, enter:

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African Crawler's spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word's spelling. If it calculates that you're likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask "Did you mean: (more common spelling)?". Clicking on the suggested spelling will launch a African Crawler search for that term. Because African Crawler's spell check is based on occurrences of all words on the Internet, it is able to suggest common spellings for proper nouns (names and places) that might not appear in a standard spell check program or dictionary.

Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meanings to African Crawler. One such word for African Crawler is the link: operator. The query link:siteURL shows you pages that point to that URL. For example, link:www.africancrawler.com will show you pages that point to African Crawler's home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search.

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