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Home > Site Help > Advanced Search > Glossary of Search Concepts
Glossary of Search Concepts
- <CONTAINS>
- An operator used to limit the scope of your
search to metadata fields that are found in the header of an HTML file.
See Metadata for more information on the metadata
operators. For example, title <CONTAINS> steam generator
will find every document in which the document title contains the exact
string "steam generator". <STARTS> and <ENDS>
function similarly as their names indicate.
- <STEM>
- An operator for expanding the scope of your
search to find all documents that contain any variant of the search
word or phrase regardless of the ending. The search engine looks at
the meaning of the word, not just its spelling. For example, if you
typed plan, the results would include documents that contain
plan, plans, or planning, but not those that contain plane or
planet.
- Asterisk
- An operator for expanding the scope of your
search. An asterisk represents 0 or more alphanumeric characters. Placing
an asterisk at the end of a word differs from stemming, in that it finds
all words that begin with the preceding string, regardless of meaning.
- HTML Title
- The title of your document, which typically appears in the application
banner of a graphical browser. The HTML title is a metadata
field that does not appear in the body of the document. You can limit
the scope of your search to include only document titles by specifying
title <CONTAINS>, <STARTS>, or <ENDS> query
in your search query. See <CONTAINS> for
more information on the use of this operator.
- Metadata (also Metatag)
- Special tagged fields in a document that provide information about
the document to search engines and other computer applications. Metadata
will not display in the main window of a graphical browser. The search
engine at the NRC Website recognizes several operators for searching
metadata fields: <CONTAINS>, <STARTS>,
<ENDS>, <MATCHES>, and =. These operators force the search
to find the exact search query (they disable stemming and proximity
searching and force the search to be sensitive to the case of the search
query).The HTML title is the only metadata field supported at the NRC Website.
- Operator
- A reserved word or character used to limit or expand your search.
Frequently used operators include AND, OR, NOT, *, and ?. For example,
steam AND generator finds all documents containing both terms
(ignoring documents that contain only steam or generator,
but not both).
Use quotation marks or parentheses to force a search of the operator itself: a search for
steam "and" generator will find all documents containing
any one or more of the three terms steam, generator, and
and. To force a search of an entire phrase as a whole (and create
any included operators as words), enclose it in quotation marks: "steam
and generator" or parentheses (steam and generator).
The alphabetical case of the operator does not matter. Alphabetical
operators other than AND, OR, and NOT must be enclosed in brackets <>
to be recognized (such as <CONTAINS>,
<MATCHES>, <NEAR>, <NEAR/x>, <STARTS>, and <ENDS>).
- Parenthesis
- An operator for limiting the scope of your
search. If you enclose a search query within
parentheses, the search will match only those files that contain the
search query exactly as typed. Parentheses force the search to match
the case of your search query, disable proximity
searching, and disable stemming.
- Phrase
- Two or more words separated by spaces. For example, Monterey otter
is interpreted as a phrase and both must be present and together to
be found. Such a search would not find documents containing sea otter
or Monterey Bay.
- Proximity Searching
- If you include more than one term in your search query and separate
them with the operator <NEAR>, the search
engine will find documents that contain any one or more of the terms,
even if the terms to not occur together. You can limit the distance
of the terms from each other by using the <NEAR/x> operator, where
x is the maximum number of words allowed between the search terms. For
example. steam <NEAR/25> generator will find all
files in which generator occurs within 25 words before or after
steam.
- Question Mark
- An operator for limiting the scope of your
search by representing a single alphanumeric character. You can use
more than one ? to indicate multiple characters. For example, ?at
finds documents that contain cat and hat, while ??at
finds documents that contain that and chat.
- Quotation Mark
- An operator for limiting the scope of your
search. See Parenthesis.
- Relevancy Ranking
- When you search the NRC website, the search engine returns a list
of pages that match your search query. This list is sorted by relevance,
with those found most relevant nearest the top of the list. Relevance
is determined by several criteria including the number of matches of
the search query in the page, the exactness of the match(es), and the
proximity of the match(es) to the top of the page.
if you included more than one word in your search query and have used
the <NEAR/x> operator, documents in which
the terms occur exactly as you typed them will be ranked higher than
those in which only one of the terms occured, or in which more than
one of the terms was found, but not in the order that you typed them,
or in which the terms did not occur next to each other.
- Search Query
- The string of characters you type into the search text box. This string
may be a single word, part of a word, or a multi-word phrase, and may
include operators.
- Wildcard
- An operator such as an Asterisk
or Question Mark.
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