Hi, new member here.  I recently found Cycleblaze and was just attempting to research info on the Erie Canal.  When searching  the journal "regions" the site narrows things down to North America.  Well, with North America being 9.5 million square miles, that still leaves lots of info on areas I'm not looking for.    When searching by the site search function I get scattered hits that may or may not be focused on the Erie Canal.   When we've toured in the past, we generally start with an area or region of some state and then narrowed things down from there.  Is there another way to search Cycleblaze for specific areas/regions and then see what journals exist within that region?  I would think behind the website is a database and databases generally have ways to slice and dice their content to find what you're looking for.  Am I missing something? thx..

I don’t think there’s a way to do exactly what you want. When someone creates a journal, they can optionally specify a region, which essentially is the continent where the trip is going to happen. There really isn’t any location information that’s more granular than that, and again even that region is optional. So, I think you’re really limited to a word search. I do see that if you search on “Erie canal” (in quotes) you’ll get about six pages worth of hits, both forum posts and journal entries. I think at that point you just need to plow through some of the data and find some interesting journals to read. There’s definitely a ton of information there, since many people on the site have done some or all of the Erie Canal trail. 

Thanks Bob.  The quotes forcing a hard search of that combination of words, rather than the words individually or together should help.   I'll dig in.  Thanks.  I hope as Cycleblaze grows they will eventually offer better search functions.  There's most certainly a database behind the website....and databases are made, literally made, to be searched. A good search engine will drive more total activity here, which is at least one reason why the sites exists, I'd guess.  Thx!

With a quick bit of searching it appears that not only do quotes work to narrow a search but but Boolean operators in the form of + and - as well. Kicks ass on what Google has become.