This page gives an overview of purpose of the website and touches on its main aspects.

The goal of The Desert Realm is to provide the fantasy loving community a central place to explore the wonders of the imagination. The search engine is the first of a dozen projects designed to give the community a home on the web.

The Desert Realm has a different focus than most large search engines. Instead of trying to index the entire web, The Desert Realm is focused on indexing only fantasy and science fiction related websites. To ensure that the search results are good, it only stores the web page's top 20 words. This is based both on the location of the word and the number of times the word shows up in the web page.

The Desert Realm only indexes homepages. A homepage is classified as anything up to one folder deep that does not include a filename; For example, www.desertrealm.com or www.desertrealm.com/search.

The search engine consists of 3 major areas: Regular Search, Advanced Search, and the Navigation Frame. You will need to have JavaScript enabled to use the website.

This is a basic search that only displays websites that contain all of the words you're searching for. If your search returns no results, you will automatically be forwarded to the advanced search and your search will be entered into its form.

This allows you to have more parameters and is able to find words that sound close to each other. Specific instructions are located on the advanced search page.

Once you click on a website's link on the search results page, it will bring you to a page with 2 frames. The top frame is The Desert Realm Navigation Frame, and the bottom is the website that you selected.

Typically when using a search engine, it's a pain to scan through many search results because you would have to click on the link, go to the website, click on the browsers back button to go back to the search page, then click on the next link in the list.

The Navigation Frame solves this problem by providing links to the previous search result, a link back to the search page, a random search result, and the next search result.

You can also cast your vote for how good you think the website in the lower section is. There will be features such as the top websites and search ranking adjustments based on voting scores in the future.

If you do not want the Navigation Frame to display any longer, click on the link titled "Remove this frame".