Below is a screenshot showing the beginning of the narrative pedigree on the Marquesses of Worcester, who eventually became Dukes of Beaufort. The text underlined in green are hypertext links to other narrative pedigrees. So, for example, clicking on Edward [Somerset], 4th Earl of Worcester, the father of the 1st Marquess of Worcester, would immediately take you to the entry on the 4th Earl of Worcester in the narrative pedigree on the Earls of Worcester. Using the navigation buttons at the top of the page you can easily retrace your steps after a series of hypertext jumps or you can use them to navigate to other pages.
Being a digital work, Cracroft's Peerage is fully searchable . Every article or narrative pedigree is assigned one or more keywords. For example, the narrative pedigree on the Marquesses of Worcester has been given three keywords: "Worcester, Marquess of" - the title of the peerage; "Marquesses of England" - the group or sub-set of peerages that this title can be placed in; and "Somerset" - the family name of the Marquesses of Worcester
The screenshot below shows what happens when you search the index for a surname such as "Howard", which is fairly common in the peerage due to the influence of the Dukes of Norfolk. The search results are shown and you can chose the appropriate narrative pedigree or article.
Like any digital text file, it is possible to search for a particular text string in Cracroft's Peerage. For example, for reasons best known to yourself you might want to know how many peers have a beaver in their coats of arms. By entering the text string "a beaver" it can be seen that four peers have a beaver in their arms. Not surprisingly, the first holder of each of these titles had a close connection with Canada. The Find facility can be used for any type of text string.
As stated above, the use of hypertext links, full indexation and the Find facility, coupled with the ability to print any page displayed on the computer screen, gives Cracroft's Peerage considerable advantages over the more traditional paper-based peerage reference works such as Burke's Peerage and Debrett's Peerage.