Boolean Searching:
Allows terms to be put into logical groups by the use of connective
terms. For example, cats AND dogs narrows a search. Cats OR dogs broadens
a search. Cats NOT dogs narrows a search. Each service explains its
connective terms for Boolean searching in its help or FAQ file. Note
that some systems are defaulted to a certain connective term without
the use of that term. In other words, in some cases cats dogs is treated
as cats OR dogs.
Field Searching: Web pages are made up of many
parts, including title, URL, text of the page, links from the page,
images on the page, etc. Some search engines allow these fields
to be searched. Combining these field searches in one search can
help the user to greatly increase the relevance of the retrieved
items, as well as allow for searching for specific information such
as how many other pages link to a certain page.
Key word in context (KWIC): These searches will
return the key word and a number of words near the key word to give
the user the context in which the key word was found.
Phrase Searching: Allows searching of phrases
when available. Note that some systems can be confusing if you think
that "Scout Report" is searching the two words together as a phrase,
when in fact the engine is searching Scout OR Report.
Proximity Searching: Allows searching of one term
within several words of another term, narrowing the search.
Relevance Feedback:Attempts to measure how closely
the retrieval matches the query, usually in quantitative terms between
0 and 100 or 0 and 1,000.
Truncation Searching: Allows searching on different
word endings or plurals with the use of a truncation wild card symbol.
For example, if the truncation symbol is *, then the search term
econ* will return items that contain economics, economy, economic,
and econometric. Car* will return items that contain cars and cartoon,
so it is advisable to use truncation symbols judiciously. See individual
help files for the specific truncation symbol used with each engine,
when available.
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