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How to Use the CTedtech Site-wide Search
Quick Tips and Examples
Refining a Search
Special Searches
Requiring or Excluding Terms
Quick Tips and Examples
It's easy to search with CTedtech Search. Just type in a few words or phrases. Try to use
discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the
better results you'll get. Here are some examples:
Search by typing words and phrases.
Pentium computer with 8x CD-ROM for sale
Inktomi Search will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the
documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't
have one of the words in your search -- CTedtech Search returns relevant results even if they don't contain all
query terms.
Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with commas.
Pentium computer with "8x CD-ROM", "for sale"
A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each
other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.
Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.
Steve Jobs, NeXT
Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example,
next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will
only match NeXT.
Return to the CTedtech Site-wide Search Page
Refining a Search
It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Here are some effective techniques to try:
Identify a phrase.
| Before: | home run records |
| After: | "home run" records |
The before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for the home page of songs like "Run, Run, Run" or baseball
statistics? Identifying "home run" as a phrase eliminates the ambiguity. This is the most powerful query refinement
technique.
Add a discriminating word or a phrase.
| Before: | "home run" records |
| After: | "home run" records baseball |
As before, the before query is ambiguous. Adding baseball makes the query less ambiguous. You'll get
more total matches (because the query is broadened with an additional term), but the relevance ranking will be better.
Capitalize when appropriate.
| Before: | wired digital white house, baby bells, bill gates |
| After: | Wired, Digital, White House, Baby Bells, Bill Gates |
These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible interpretations. For example, without capitalization,
wired could refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could refer to the Bells'
children on the "Young and the Restless." Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. It is always a good idea to
capitalize proper names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-).
| Before: | Barney |
| After: | Barney, +Smith -dinosaur |
Barney alone is ambiguous. It it looking for Smith Barney investment information or cartoon dinosaur
pages? You can use the reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation. Or,
you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document. The after version above does both.
Use a field specifier.
| Before: | Sun workstation |
| After: | Sun workstation, site:sun.com, title:Ultra |
If you are looking for a particular page that you know the site or title, use the site: or title: field
specifier to search for that the word or phrase in the site or title of the page.
Return to the CTedtech Site-wide Search Page
Special Searches
You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using CTedtech Search field
syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, and any additional
information defined with a HTML meta tag. The field name should be in lower case, and immediately followed by a
colon. There should be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.
Examples
link:www.state.pa.us
Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with www.state.pa.us in its URL. For example,
you can use +link:www.state.pa.us -site:www.state.pa.us to see how many
external links point to the State of Pennsylvania's website. Some search engines call this feature
"searching backwards".
site:sun.com
Finds pages on the web site sun.com. The site field search examines the "site" part of the URL
only. Therefore, site:sun.com will find such sites as java.sun.com, www.sun.com and
playground.sun.com, but won't match any site that ends in sun.co.uk. You can use the site
field search to bring up all pages at a particular web site.
url:bar
Finds pages with the word bar anywhere in the page's URL. For example:
http://www.foo.com/bar.html
title:"The New York Times"
Finds pages with the phrase "The New York Times" in the title portion of the document.
Return to the CTedtech Site-wide Search Page
Requiring or Excluding Terms
CTedtech Search has a simple query syntax which gives you the pinpoint search power of
Boolean logic, without having to remember complex queries. The table below shows the CTedtech
Search operators that correspond to Boolean operators:
CTedtech Search
operator |
Boolean
equivalent |
default operator:
you need not use any special symbols |
OR |
| + |
AND |
| - |
NOT |
phrase operator:
enclose the phrase with double quotation marks |
ADJ |
Boolean queries use the logical operators AND, OR, NOT and ADJ (adjacent). Suppose you wanted to find plain
paper color laser printers made by companies other than HP. This query can be specified in Boolean logic as:
(laser ADJ printer) AND (color OR (plain ADJ paper)) AND NOT (HP OR Hewlett-Packard)
Using CTedtech Search operators, the complex query above may be typed into the search box as:
+"laser printer" color "plain paper" -HP, -Hewlett-Packard
This query specifies that:
- All returned documents must contain the phrase "laser printer".
- Documents containing one or more of the terms "laser printer", color, or
"plain paper" will be ranked at the top (the more terms matched, the higher the ranking).
- None of the documents returned will contain either HP or Hewlett-Packard.
Statistical Weighting and CTedtech Search Searches
A traditional Boolean search returns an unsorted list of all items that match the search condition.
CTedtech Search goes considerably beyond this by using advanced statistical search technology
to return the results sorted with the "best" matches listed at the top. Unlike plain Boolean searches,
CTedtech Search automatically weights your query terms based on their statistical uniqueness.
Common terms, such as "shall," get a much lower weighting than less frequently occurring terms, such as the phrase
"golf courses."
CTedtech Search's advanced statistical weighting allows you to just type in relevant words
and phrases, and the system will provide the answer to your query in the top few documents! Since there are
cases in which it is convenient to narrow a query using Boolean operators, CTedtech Search
Server allows you to use the + and - Boolean operators. With CTedtech Search, you get the
accurate ranking of statistical searching combined with the information filtering of Boolean searching.
Return to the CTedtech Site-wide Search Page
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