Defense Information Infrastructure
Common Operating Environment

Search DII COE Homepage for a word or phrase:

Search COE Data Emporium

Search Configuration Management

Search Basics

The following Search Tips are a guide to using the Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment website search system to find the aerospace information you need. The guide starts with an overview of searching and moves from simple searches using a single word or phrase to more complicated searches. Use the many examples as an aid to formulating your own searches.

Quick Tips

For more information, click the link in the following quick tips:
  • Use an asterisk or leave blank when the search criteria is unknown.

  • Use a wildcard when only a portion of search criteria is known. Enter an asterisk at the beginning or end of your search term.
    sale* will retrieve sales, salesman
    *man will retrieve salesman, mailman
  • Enter your search terms in lower case with a space between the terms.
    sales offices
    You can also enter a full question or concept in plain language.
    Where are the sales offices?
  • Capitalize proper nouns to search for specific people, places, or products.
    John Colter, Netscape Navigator
  • Enclose a phrase in double quotes to search for that exact phrase.
    "museum of natural history" "museum of modern art"
  • Narrow your searches by using a + if a search term must appear on a page.
    museum +art
  • Exclude pages by using a - if a search term must not appear on a page.
    museum -Paris
Combine these techniques to create a specific search query. The better your description of the information you want, the more relevant your results will be.
museum +"natural history" dinosaur -Chicago

What Is a Search?

A search is the organized pursuit of information. Somewhere in a collection of documents, email messages, Web pages, and other sources, there is information that you want to find, but you have no idea where it is. The search system gives you the means of finding that information.

You conduct a search by issuing a query, which is simply a way of asking a question that will find the information you are looking for. Searching is often an iterative process. You submit a query and if the results list does not contain the information you are looking for, you modify the query until you locate a page that contains the answer. 

Tools for Searching

The search system provides the following tools to help you find what you are looking for:
  • A search form to enter your query
  • Ways to broaden or narrow the extent of your search
  • A results list of pages that match your query
The search system produces a ranked list where the documents at the top of the list are more likely to be relevant than the documents toward the bottom.

The relevance of a document is based on how many of the search terms are present in the document, how frequently the search terms occur, and how close the search terms are to each other. 

Verity

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Last Updated: 1/11/01
coe_web@ncr.disa.mil