After you have specified your keyword(s) (inside the "" query box) and clicked on the search button, the Earth Sciences Portal will search through the five areas of its links directory database for keyword matches. These five areas are: Earth Sciences Portal category names, link titles, link URLs, link descriptions, and link keywords.
The first page returned to you will be a list of matching Earth Sciences Portal Categories followed by a list of matching Directorate web sites.
Since categories are populated with Earth Sciences Portal sites, a category can yield dozens of relevant web sites. That's why we put them first.
Of course, if no categories match your search terms, we send you
straight to the web sites.
Earth Sciences Portal sites are listed with the categories that contain them. That
way, you can click on the category above the site to get a whole
bunch of related sites. This powerful search strategy is a great way to
discover related web sites.
The Earth Sciences Portal search looks for two main things: 1) categories, and 2) web sites titles, descriptions, and keywords.
The Earth Sciences Portal searches for matches in its
links database and then ranks the results in order of most relevant to
least relevant. Some of the factors that affect relevancy are:
the number of search words matched. The more words
matched, the higher the rank.
exact word matches. These are ranked higher than
approximate matches.
where in an entry the search words were found. A match
in the title of a site is ranked higher than a match in its
description, keywords or URL.