MSJC - Ron Lehr’s Classes

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Search (Query Language) Information

The simple text search allows queries to be formed from “Boolean” expressions containing the keywords “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”, as well as grouping within parentheses. The advanced search allows additional criterion - such as date your text search phrase was added to a web page - as well as other criteria . 

For example:

information retrieval

finds documents containing “information” or “retrieval”

information or retrieval
same as above

 

information and retrieval
finds documents containing both “information” and “retrieval”

 

information not retrieval
finds documents containing “information” but not “retrieval”

(information not retrieval) and schedule
finds documents containing “schedule”, plus “information” but not “retrieval”

web*
finds documents containing words starting with “web”

Search Tips

Check spelling - Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. The search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms - but it is always best to spell the search terms correctly.

Use multiple words - This will return more refined results than a search from a single word.

Use similar words - The more similar words you use in a search, the more relevant results will be to the words that you are searching for.

Use appropriate capitalization - Capitalize proper nouns such as the name of a person. Lowercase words will match any words of any case.

Use quotation marks to force exact matches. For example, search for “content management system”.

Use Boolean plus (+) or minus (-) operators - Precede a search term or phrase with a plus (+) sign to indicate it must appear in a search result. Precede a search term with a minus (-) sign to indicate an undesirable search term or phrase that must not appear in a search result. For example, searching for +dogs -collie will return results that are about dogs, but not about collies.

Use field searches - Field searches allow you to search for words that appear in a specific part of a document such as the body text (body:), title text (title:), alt text (alt:), meta description (desc:), meta keywords (keys:) or URL (url:). The field name should include the colon and precede the search word or phrase with no spaces between them. For example, searching for title:presidents will find pages with presidents in the title of the page.

 

More Information and Tips:

http://center.atomz.com/support/search_tips.htm

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Ronald L. Lehr - MSJC Instructor.
Copyright © 1996 - 2006, R. Lehr / MSJC. All rights reserved.
Revised: February 03, 2006.