What is in the index

Search covers everything published here, currently 94 pages, and it grows as new material is published: the guides, every state and county law page, the calculators, the gear specifications, the course lessons, the printable documents, the glossary, and the community sections. It runs against the actual text of each page rather than against titles alone, so a phrase buried in the middle of a county page is findable.

Guides and articles (7 pages) - Long-form pieces on power, water, heat, building, land, money and the rest, organized by topic.
Reference (2 pages) - Glossary, spare parts, printable checklists, open data and methodology.

How the matching works

Every word you type has to appear somewhere on the page, so adding words narrows the results rather than widening them. That is the opposite of how a web search engine behaves, and it is the single most useful thing to know here: to narrow a broad result set, add a word; to widen a narrow one, remove a word.

Two things soften that rule. Very common words are ignored rather than required, so typing a question in full works: “how much solar do I need” is treated as “solar need”. And when nothing at all matches every word, the closest matches are shown instead rather than an empty page, ranked by how many of your words they carry.

Results are ranked by how well the page matches, then weighted by what kind of page it is, so a guide written about a subject outranks a county page that merely mentions it in passing. A match in the title counts for a good deal more than a match in the body. Words shorter than three letters are ignored by the index, which is why searching for a two-letter state abbreviation on its own will not do what you want; use the state name.

The tabs above the results split them by section, with a count for each, so a search that returns four hundred county pages and six guides can be narrowed to the six in one click. The counts are for the whole result set rather than the current page.

If you cannot find something

A search that returns nothing usually means one of three things, and they are worth telling apart. The commonest is that one word in the query is too specific: a model name, a spelling variant, or a term this site simply does not use. Dropping the rarest word and searching again fixes most of these, because every word you type has to appear.

The second is that the page exists but describes the thing differently. Written material uses the words its author reached for, which are not always the words a reader reaches for, and no amount of matching bridges that gap on its own. Trying the plainer word rather than the technical one, or the technical one rather than the plain one, is usually quicker than rephrasing the whole question.

The third is that the material genuinely is not here yet. That is worth knowing rather than guessing at, and it is worth telling us: a search that found nothing is the clearest possible signal about what is missing, and it is more useful than most feedback because it arrives with the exact words somebody actually used. There is a contact page for exactly that.

How the index is built

The index is rebuilt from the site itself rather than maintained by hand, so it cannot drift out of step with what is published. Every page that appears in the sitemap is fetched, reduced to its visible text, and stored with its title, its description and the kind of page it is. Nothing is indexed that a visitor could not read, which means navigation, footers and markup never influence a result.

Because it is rebuilt rather than appended to, a page that is removed leaves the index at the next rebuild instead of lingering as a dead result. A page that is edited is re-read in full rather than patched. The practical consequence is that search here reflects the site as it stands now, and a result you click will be the page you were shown.

Narrowing a search

Because every word has to appear, the fastest way to narrow a broad result set is to add one specific word rather than to rephrase the question. A search for battery returns most of the site; battery cold charging returns the handful of pages that actually discuss the temperature limit.

For an exact wording, put it in double quotes. A quoted phrase has to appear intact, so "depth of discharge" finds the pages that use the term rather than every page containing all three words somewhere. Quotes are the only operator here, deliberately: a reference site does not need a query language, and anything more elaborate mostly produces empty results.

The section tabs above the results do the rest of the narrowing. A search that returns six hundred county pages and a dozen guides becomes a dozen guides in one click, and the counts tell you what you would be hiding before you click.

Why the results are in that order

Each result is scored on how strongly the page matches, then multiplied by a weight for the kind of page it is, and given a further boost when the match is in the title rather than the body. That combination is what stops a search like composting toilet from burying the guide that explains composting toilets under several hundred county pages that mention them in a list of eight verdicts.

The weighting reflects what people are usually looking for: a guide written about a subject outranks a reference page that mentions it, which outranks a county page where the phrase appears once, which outranks a legal page. Where you actually want the county pages, the tab is right there with a count.

Within the same kind, shorter and more specific titles come first, on the assumption that a page named after your search is more likely to be about it than a longer page that happens to contain the words.

Some searches worth trying

For a place: baker county georgia, or a town name with its state. For a rule: composting toilet, rainwater harvesting, minimum dwelling size.

For a number you are trying to work out: how much battery, wire gauge, heating degree days. For a component: a model number, a brand, or a specification such as open circuit voltage.

For something you half-remember reading here, two distinctive words usually beat a whole remembered sentence, because the sentence probably was not worded the way you remember it.

What is not in the index

Anything that is not a public page. The admin, member account pages, forms and their confirmations, and anything behind a sign-in are all absent, and so are the machine-readable files: the sitemap, the data exports, and the JSON endpoints. What you can reach as a visitor is what you can search.

Images and the text inside downloadable documents are not indexed either, though the printable pages that carry them are, along with the guidance written around each one.

Search is rebuilt from the site's own sitemap, so a page that has been removed disappears from results on the next rebuild rather than lingering as a dead link, and a page published today is searchable without anyone having to remember to add it.

Searching the community sections

Forum boards, classifieds categories, real estate and personals listings are all indexed, and they are grouped under the Community tab so they never crowd out a guide when you were looking for one. Individual forum threads are indexed too, which means a question somebody asked eighteen months ago is findable by the words in it.

Using it with a keyboard, and without JavaScript

The search box in the header suggests pages as you type. Arrow keys move through the suggestions, Enter opens the highlighted one, and Escape closes the list. Pressing Enter without a highlighted suggestion runs the full search, which is usually what you want when the suggestion list has not found what you meant.

None of that is required. The form is an ordinary one: with JavaScript off, or on a connection where the suggestion request never arrives, typing a query and pressing Enter still runs the search and returns the same results. The suggestions are an accelerator rather than the mechanism.

If a search comes back empty

Three things cause almost every empty result here, and all three are quick to rule out. The first is too many words: every one of them has to appear on the page, so a full sentence typed as a question will usually match nothing at all. Cut it to the two or three words that carry the meaning.

The second is a word the index cannot see. Anything shorter than three letters is ignored by the index, which is why a two-letter abbreviation such as RV finds nothing on its own, and so are the most common English words, so a search made entirely of short or common words has nothing to work with. Add one specific noun and it will usually resolve.

The third is that the page genuinely uses different words. Most trades have pairs of terms that mean the same thing but never appear together on the same page, and a search matches the words themselves rather than the idea behind them. If the obvious term returns nothing, the second obvious term frequently returns everything.

And sometimes the answer is that it has not been written yet. That is worth knowing rather than guessing at, so if you searched for something reasonable and found nothing, say so. Requests shape what gets researched next, and a search that should have worked and did not is the most useful feedback this site gets.

What the index is built from

The index is rebuilt from the site's own sitemap, so it cannot contain a page that no longer exists, and it is refreshed automatically as new material is published. Guides and law pages are indexed straight from the database, with their full text; every other page is read exactly as a visitor would see it and reduced to its words.

Nothing about you is stored when you search. Queries are not logged against a visitor, there is no personalization, and results are the same for everybody. The privacy policy sets out the whole position.