Search Engine Features and Capabilities

The Baseball-Reference.com search engine is not a full-featured search engine like Google that indexes all of the information on the pages and then tries to match your search to what they think you want.

Instead, we use a set of rules to try and match your request to the set of pages on the site. Player searches go to the main player page. What looks like team searches go to team pages, etc.

Players

Player Searches have always been handled fairly well. We search both the player's common name along with their given names and nicknames. We match on the beginning of the player's name, so partial names are allowed at the beginning of the search, though some searches will return a lot of names (we give you 50 at a time). For example, you can get to Ted Williams's page by using:

  • Ted Williams
  • The Ted Williams - sends you directly to the most popular page matching "Ted Williams"
  • T Williams
  • Williams,T
  • T Will
  • Theodore Williams
  • Teddy Ballgame
  • Splendid Splinter

We also catalog all unsuccessful searches, so most common misspellings are included in the database as well. We'd be happy to discuss licensing our database of misspellings.

Teams, Leagues and Postseason

We have added in all of the current team nicknames and IDs, league IDs, and postseason series IDs, so you can now find teams, leagues, and postseason series. All of the following searches will return correct results.

  • BOS 2007
  • Teams
  • franch NYY
  • Mets 2001
  • 1919 CHW
  • 1970 Mets
  • KCR
  • BlueJays
  • Franchise Dodgers
  • 1910 WS
  • ALCS 2002
  • 1907 WorldSeries

Others and Easter Eggs

Additionally all of the site directories are included in the search engine. Beyond that we track all search requests and anything that shows up at least 100 times will eventually be included in the search engine as a direct link. There are also a few quirky things that we've added just for fun.

  • Bowie Kuhn
  • awards
  • leagues
  • mvp
  • Scott Boras
  • Brien Taylor
  • homeruns
  • triple crown
  • roy hobbs

Feel free to give us some feedback if there is a search term, feature, or shortcut you want us to add, or if something doesn't appear to be working correctly.