Search Help

Basic Searches

When you enter a single word in the search keywords field and click the Search button, the search engine will look into it's index for the word. If it is found, the corresponding list of pages that contain that word is returned as the search results. This is the most basic type of search, and is often very productive.

Boolean Searches

If you enter more than one word to search for, the search engine will apply Boolean (and/or) logic to determine what pages match your search. Selecting "all of these words" in the "Return documents containing" popup menu performs a Boolean AND search if more than one word is provided to search with. For example, a search using the words "research development" is essentially looking for "research" AND "development" on the same page. Only pages that contain all of the search words are returned.

Selecting "any word" in the "Return documents containing" popup menu performs a Boolean OR search if more than one word is provided to search with. Any page with at least one of the search words will be returned. AND searching ("all of these words") will usually return a smaller list of pages found. OR searching ("any word") will generally produce a much larger number of pages found, especially when many keywords are entered in the search string.

Search Results

The top of the results page from a search shows the words used in the search and the number of pages found. If more pages are found than the maximum to display, the number of pages listed is displayed along with the total number found.

The result information for each page found by a search displays the following information:

Relevance of page

HTML Title (or file name if no title is present)

Size of the page

Date the page was last modified

The description or summary of the page

The full URL to the page

Search results are always sorted by relevance (the most relevant first). Relevance is based on the number of occurrences and positioning of words as they appear in each document. For example, words in the HTML TITLE tag are weighted heavier than words that are contained in the body of the page. The search engine gives increased weight to words occurring in the title, meta keywords tag, headings and hypertext links.

The most relevant page is displayed showing 100% relevance. Each additional page displays a percentage relative to the most relevant page. For example, if the most relevant page scored a 20 and the next page scored 16, the second page would display a relevance of 80%.

Finding Similar Pages

When detailed results are returned from a search, each page listed has an option to "Find similar pages". Each page indexed by the search engine contains a summary string of words most represented on the page. Clicking the "Find similar pages" link for a page will make the search engine find pages similar to the selected page. It does this by performing a new search for the most relevant words in the selected page.

Search Tips

Noise Words

The search engine does not include common words such as "also", "been" and "there" in the index. These words are ignored when searching. If one or more is used in a search, a message will be displayed on the results page indicating which words were noise words.

Punctuation

Some punctuation characters within words are indexed. This makes it possible to search for words like "CD-ROM" or "Version 2.5". Apostrophes, such as in contractions like "don't", are not indexed.

The characters $ and - are indexed when they appear at the beginning of words. Characters , . / - and $ are indexed when they appear inside a word. Punctuation at the end of words is never indexed.

When searching, you may need to try several possible combinations of a word containing punctuation. A word such as "e-mail", which is not consistently hyphenated, is a good example.

Accented Characters

The search engine supports special characters with ISO Latin encoding, however, it does not index characters with accent marks. Accented characters are indexed without the accent. It also converts HTML entities into the base character for inclusion in the index. It is important to note that for searching the following characters are all considered equal: e, E, é (é), É (É), ë (ë), etc. So a search for "Café" will also find "Cafe", "CAFE", "Cafë", etc. Searching for "Café" will not work.