Search engine for the Ramsar Web site

Ramsar logo The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands

This facility is presently not working. We have just changed to a new server with another provider and have not yet been able to establish a new search engine, but the delay should be a short one.

Search engine for the Ramsar Web site

Search Ramsar

This Sony SSE search engine counts occurrences of all words in all HTML files on the Ramsar Web site, and thus it can be useful for finding references to concepts, organizations, and people wherever they may appear, ranked in order of the number of occurrences of the keywords within each file. It is less useful for finding specific files, for example the "Ramsar List" or the list of Contracting Parties, and for this purpose it might be preferable to use the long Global Index to the site, the short Index à la Carte, and the index to Key Documents subject areas.

Search the Ramsar Web site:

In this engine, files of .doc, .xls, and .pdf types are not counted, only .html Web pages. The maximum number of references the engine returns is 100, so keywords like "ramsar" or "wetlands" are not useful unless linked with some other limiting term. The rankings in order can often be misleading, and apparently the engine does not like numbers at all. It also hates accented characters, lamentably.

Since the links returned by the search refer to whole Web pages, and not to occurrences of the keywords within those pages, in the case of long documents it might be helpful to repeat the search within the page using the browser's "Find in page" function.

Boolean searching. This engine provides the ability to use words such as AND, OR, NOT and ( ) brackets, to customize your search:

example: digital AND video
example: CD-R NOT CD-ROM
example: (VTR OR VCR) AND tape

When you type two or more words such as: "digital video camera", the engine assumes that each word is connected with "AND".

For further information about the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, please contact the Ramsar Convention Bureau, Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland (tel +41 22 999 0170, fax +41 22 999 0169, e-mail ). Posted 3 October 2001, Dwight Peck, Ramsar.