Search Come and Hear™

For searching Come and Hear™ on the Internet, two search engines are available: Picosearch and Google.

Search with Picosearch

Picosearch will have Come and Hear™ indexed from the first day (July 14, 2003). It may be used immediately to search every document on Come-and-Hear.com. From the drop list, the user may restrict the search to the writings of Carol Valentine, the writings of Elizabeth Dilling, the text of the Talmud, or the rabbinical writings and supplementary materials.

Use the Help button to take full advantage of the search features available.

Search with Google

The Google crawler will eventually find Come-and-Hear.com, and then Google may be used through this form. If you are viewing Come and Hear™ on a mirror site and the webmaster has properly modified this page, you will be able to use the Google engine.

Helpful Hints for Searching

1. Unless otherwise specified, these tools are generally indifferent to upper and lower case.
2. Search keys are words of three or more letters, and may appear anywhere on the target page in any sequence.
3. The 1961 edition Soncino Press Talmud, used as the basis of this web presentation, included a separate Index volume, assembled by human effort. The result is more than 450 pages of carefully selected topics and references. Since it was assembled at the level of human intelligence, alternate forms of words are ignored, and the indexer was able to include pages where the subject was understood, though the word was not specifically mentioned, or was mentioned in an alternate form or a synonym.
       However, the Come and Hear™ search databases were built through mechanical indexers rather than human intelligence. In the Picosearch tool, some attempt is made to identify alternate forms of the same word through a process of "stemming." By this system, the search terms "stone", "stoned", and "stoning" will find the same page if any of the three terms are used as a search key. Words with irregular forms (come, came — swim, swam — wife, wives) are not solved with simple stemming. These alternate forms must be searched separately.
       In Google, grammatical word forms are indexed separately, and a page containing only the word "stoning" will not be found with the search term "stone".
   
4. If a search does not produce desired results, consider synonyms. If looking for pages concerning "women", try also the terms "woman", "female", "girl", "maiden", "wife", "damsel", "virgin", "harlot", "rival", and other word forms and synonyms.
   
5. Transliteration from Hebrew and/or Aramaic words and names is not consistent, even within the Soncino. Halachah is commonly spelled as halakhah or halacka elsewhere, Akiba as Akiva, etc. The common variant is dropping the terminal "h" on "-ah" words.

Footnotes

1. The facility of the Soncino Index is another reason for the serious student to purchase the printed Soncino Babylonian Talmud.