Figure 1.--

HBC as you no doubt have found has become a rather large site. Thus a search engine has become essential to track down HBC pages with the information you need. HBC initially had trouble finding an internal search engine that worked well. Hispeed, one of our previous internet hosts provided an Excite search engine that functioned reasonably for a few years, but was diabaled (December 2002). We began experimenting with other alternatives. Use the HBC search engine which will find pertinent pages for you automatically. We have experimented with Freefind which is an advertising based service. It does do a search, but we are not real pleased with the results. We now found two external search system which provide excellent results using first Google and then Bing.

Internal Search Engines

Here are the internal search engines we have experimented with. We have not found any of them very effective and most have been discontinued. The on;y we know that still functions is FreeFind.

FreeFind Search Engine

We are currently using Freefind which is an advertising based service. Sorry about the advertising. We hope you will not find it too distracting. Let us know how this system works for you. This system does work, but there are problems, not the least of which is the searches reach less than a third of the site.

External Search Engine

Here I think is an answer to the need for a search engine that effectives searches the entire site. Some of you have browses with a "Search Site" button. That works well. If you do not, than all you have to do is bring up your Google or Bing (and probably other) search engines up. Google and Bing have advanced search links. Or you can add "site:histclo.com" (without the quotation marks of course) to your search in the search box. For example if you want to search HBC for 'skeleton suits', the search box would read, "skeleton suits site:histclo.com". Or beter put "sketon suits" or "skeleton suit" in quotation marks.