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Searching Tips

Quick Tips and Examples

It is easy to search with Ultraseek. 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

Ultraseek 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 worked in your search -- Ultraseek 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 works 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 works in any case, otherwise, and 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.

Refining a Search

It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Here are some effective techniques to try:

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 work 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 and 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. Is 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. See Special Searches for more information on field specifiers.

Special Searches

You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using Ultraseek field syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, and any additional information defined with an 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.

Example

link:www.verity.com

Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with www.verity.com in its URL. For example, you can use +link:www.verity.com -site:www.verity.com to see how many external links point to the verity 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

You can also use the url field selection to find out the exact number of pages currently in the database. Just type url:http. This number updates as pages are added and removed from our database.

title:"The New York Times"

Finds pages with the phrase "The New York Times" in the title portion of the document.

likes:chocolate

Finds pages with an HTML meta tag with name likes and with name likes and with content containing chocolate. For example:

This is an example of a field defined by an HTML meta tag. There is nothing special about the worked likes. Any search field can be defined with a meta tags, as long as the name of the field is a single word made from all small letters.

Requiring or Excluding Terms

Ultraseek 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 Ultraseek operators that correspond to Boolean Operators

Ultraseek 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 Ultraseek 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 UltraSeek Searches

A traditional Boolean search returns an unsorted list of all items that match the search condition. Ultraseek 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, Ultraseek 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."

Ultraseek'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, Ultraseek Server allows you to use the + and - Boolean operators. With Ultraseek, you get the accurate ranking of statistical searching combined with the information filtering of Boolean searching.

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