I Can't Find What I am Looking For in Database Search

For an explanation of how Search works on the site, see Search Tips

All our databases provide a separate Search facility from the general Site search box found at the top of most pages.

The following remarks apply ONLY to database searches, not Site Searches.

Of course, the most likely reason your Search turns up nothing is that what you are looking for isn't in the database. We work hard to get as much into each database as possible, but we can't promise to get everything.

 The next most likely reason is your spelling is either wrong in the sense you spelled the name incorrectly (Brawn when you  meant to Search for Brown), or the name itself is different from what you thought (It's Browne not Brown). So to cover these bases, check your spelling and try different variants.

The next reason is that the word you are looking for is on the MySQL stopword list used by our software.

MySQL Stopword List

Our databases are MySQL, the most widely used database in the world. It's fast and very reliable.

All MySQL searches you make pass through what is known as a stopword list, essentially a list of words MySQL does not index, it just ignores them. If you try to Search on any word in the stopword list, your search will fail. Therefore if the name you are looking for just happens to be the same as a word in the stoplist, you won't be able to Search for it. If this is the case, just send us a message via the Helpdesk and we will conduct a manual Search for you. You can see the stopword list here.

Search for name 'Down'

The only word on the Stopword List that corresponds to a real name that we have found is 'Down'. To deal with this we changed any 'Down' in a database to 'Downe" and made a note alongside that the real name is 'Down''