For searching Come and Hear™ on a CD or your local hard drive, one search tool is available: Fish and Fumble.

## Search with Fish and Fumble - CD Search Tool

1. Fish and Fumble, based on JavaScript, will load a large file into memory the first time it is opened. It may take a minute or two. Once the search window is loaded, it is best not to close that window or load it with other pages if you are intending to return to the search tool.
2. Because of the time required to load the indexed material and its limited capabilities, this tool should not be used over the Net. The free Picosearch and Google tools are better, faster, and more robust. Consult the You Can Help page for more information on setting up those tools on a Come and Hear™ mirror site.
3. Fish and Fumble is indifferent to upper and lower case text and search terms.
4. Search keys are words of three or more letters, and may appear anywhere on the target page in any sequence.
5. 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, (1) 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 Fish and Fumble, 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. To limit the size of the index, common English words have been dropped from the listing. In the common language of search engines, such words are "stop-terms." A list of those terms is found in the stop terms file.
9. Add + in front of terms that must appear in results
10. Add - in front of terms that must not appear in results
11. While the index sometimes take minutes to return a list of matching pages, it is comforting to remember that this tool is still faster that searching the more than 1500 pages manually.
12. Clicking on a found page will open that page in a new window. When finished with the new window, the new window should be closed to return to the list of found pages.

Footnotes

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

Caution: Unfortunately, stemming can be a little too efficient. Consider the word "bestiality." The common suffix "-ity" is removed first, making "bestial," then the common suffix "-ial" is removed from the remainder. The result is "best," and all incidences of "best" are indexed with "bestiality," a result that most decidedly not wanted or expected. This collision of terms is relatively rare, but it does occur. We are looking for a cure.