Help

See also help by example below.

How to conduct simple searches

• Choose a "field" from the pop-up list and enter your query term in the "text term" box.
• If you use the two rows, then join them together using a Boolean "and/or" operator.
• The first clause cannot be left blank.
• Press the "Submit query" button.

What is meant by "Full Text"?

Every word in every document has been indexed, as well as the text in certain fields. "FullText" means "search for the term anywhere in any text of the document, even in hidden text such as behind the hypertext anchors of URLs".

What are "fields"?

Our indexing programs read all of the HTML documents on this server. As described above they index every word in the document. They also index the words that are found in certain structured parts (or fields) of the documents.

The fields that are available for searching with this interface are:

• Full Text
• the whole document (every word) is one virtual field
• HEAD
• the hidden section at the top of the HTML document
• often has information such as the title, author name, and date of publication
• BODY
• the part of the HTML document that is visible
• all of the document except the HEAD section
• specifically excludes the TITLE field
• TITLE
• the title field in the hidden HEAD section

Join terms with Boolean operators

Combining two search terms into one logical query is done using the operators AND, OR, ANDNOT, NEAR.

AND

The query "solar AND energy" will find only documents that contain both words.

OR

The query "solar OR wind" will find only documents that contain either word (as well as both words).

ANDNOT

The query "solar ANDNOT wind" will find only documents that contain the word "solar" but do not contain the word "wind". ANDNOT is the complement of AND.

NEAR

This means "find search term #1 within 50 characters of search term #2".

Text terms

A "word" consists of a group of non-blank characters, e.g. solar

A "word list" consists of two or more words separated by blanks. A Boolean OR is implied between words in the word list, e.g. solar alternative natural will find documents that contain at least one of those words.

A "phrase" consists of a word list enclosed in double-quotes. The value to be searched for is exactly the word order that appears in the phrase, e.g. "passive solar"

Phrase searching

To search for a phrase, enclose the term in double quotes ...

• "passive solar" means "find these two words occurring adjacent to each other and in the specified order".

If the quotes are omitted then the query terms will be treated as a word list.

Case insensitive

Searching is completely case-insensitive ...

• "solar", "Solar", and "SOLAR" are equivalent.

Wildcards and right-truncation

A limited wildcard facility is supported with right-truncation. Append an asterix "*" to the end of a search term to match any word that begins with the given prefix. Use the wildcard to search for all plural and singular forms of a word. This is also useful if you are not sure how to spell the end of a word.

Use as many known characters in the term as possible to get a more accurate and faster search. The use of wildcards does cause a slower search.

• heat* will match "heat, heating, heater, heated"
• window* will match "window, windows"

Ranking of results

The search results are scored and then ranked according to their relevancy within the set of results.

A document that contains more instances of high-scoring search terms will get ranked higher. What makes a search term "high-scoring"? Basically, the fewer documents the term occurs in, the more important it must be. If many instances of the term occur in a particular document, then that document will be ranked higher, especially if it is a short document.

Common words are excluded from the query

Certain very common words are discarded from the query. These "stop words" such as: it, these, and, or, a, also, two will have no effect. Here is the complete current list of 400 stop words.

Help by example