Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

7.14. What does it mean when I see too many items found?

This is the bane of all Veronica searches and it means that the word or set of words that you've used are insufficient to narrow the search down to a reasonable number of hits. There are several ways to address this problem: specify that Veronica can show you more than the default 200 matches; specify that it should look only for specific types of menu items; or add further keywords.

Note: If you get that annoying too many items found message, try changing the order of the keywords. Put less common words first, followed by more common ones. In multiword searches, Veronica searches for the first word first, and then moves on to the next keyword. In the interest of performance, if there are too many "hits" on the first word, Veronica gives up with the too many items message before scanning the rest of the words. I searched for David Letterman and saw too many items, but searching for Letterman David worked. The word David probably hit thousands of times, causing Veronica to give up early. The word Letterman hit relatively few times, so the program could continue.
Veronica can search with more sophisticated patterns than just a word like physiology. In fact, there is a variety of file types that it can match, each of which is specified in the Veronica search string by prefixing -t to the item type indicated in the table that follows. 
Type	Item description
For example, if I wanted to search for directories on any Veronica server that had the word chicken in them, I could use the search string chicken -t1 (and find that there are over 2300 matches, incredibly enough!).

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