Search Tips

Searching, General Search Tips, Number of results returned, Search results, Search buttons

Searching

Enter your search word(s) and click the Search button. The search engine will return a list of pages that contain your word(s), and you can click on the corresponding URL to go to each of these pages.

General Search Tips

Choose the most unusual words, if possible (not health!).

Common words such as "also", "been", and "there" are ignored by the search engine.

Indexing (means that the search engine will recognize the characters as part of the search term):

• Some punctuation characters within words are indexed (e.g., hyphens as in "CD-ROM" or periods as in "Version 2.5").

• Apostrophes (e.g., "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 not indexed.

• When searching, you may need to try several combinations of a word containing punctuation (e.g., "e-mail" or "email", since this term is not consistently hyphenated).

• Accented characters are indexed without the accent, and searching is not case sensitive. The following characters are all considered equal: e, E, é, É, and ë. So, a search for "Café" will also find "Cafe", "CAFE", and "Cafë".

Find pages with any/all (Boolean) searching

AND searching (" find pages with all words") is more precise and returns a smaller list of pages found. OR searching ("find pages with any words") is more general and will produce a larger number of pages found.

To conduct AND searches (i.e., to find Web pages that contain all of the words entered), enter the words in the search field and select "all" in the "Find pages with" pop-up menu.

To conduct OR searches (i.e., to find Web pages that contain at least one of the words entered), enter the words in the search field and select "any" in the "Find pages with" pop-up menu.

Number of Results Returned

Use this pop-up menu to choose the length of the search results page, either 10 or 25 items. When searches yield more than the number of return results selected, there will be buttons at the bottom of the results pages that allow you to move forward and backward through the sets of found pages.

Search Results

The top of the search results page shows the words used in the search and the number of pages found. If more pages are found than the maximum selected to display, the number of pages found is given along with the number displayed on the first results page (e.g., "Searching for "infant" found 99 pages and returned 1 through 10.").

If the "Detailed Results" box is not checked on the search page, the results will contain the following information for each page found by the search:

Relevance of the page (See explanation below).

Page title (or file name if no title is present).

Page size.

If the "Detailed Results" box is checked on the search page, the results will contain this additional information:

Date page was last modified.

Page description.

Page location (URL).

Find similar pages (See explanation below).

Relevance. Search results are 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 more heavily 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 first showing 100% relevance. Each additional page displays relevance compared 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%.

Search Buttons

At the top of the results page is a window showing the search words that were used and a new Search button. To perform another search with different words and the same checked options (e.g., "Begins With Searching"), enter new words in the window and click on the Search button.

At the bottom of the results page is a New Search button. Clicking on this button will take you to the original search page, and the buttons will be preset to the default settings.