Search Engine Features and Capabilities

The Pro-Football-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.

Players

Player Searches have always been handled fairly well. We search both the player's common name along with their given names. 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 Joe Namath's page by using:

  • Joe Namath
  • J Namath
  • Namath,J
  • J Nam
  • Joe Willie
  • Joseph William

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 and Leagues and Postseason

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

  • patriots 2007
  • Teams
  • franch nyg
  • 2001 lions
  • nyj franch
  • Franchise bears
  • eagles

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.

  • blog
  • leagues
  • years
  • doug drinen
  • coaches
  • random
  • linemen
  • touchdowns
  • Bobby Boucher

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.