Search Engine Help

• Spell out abbreviations: GI => Gastroenterology, HR => Human Resources.
• Spell out the entire word. For example, occ health becomes occupational health. You can also use prefix matching like occ* health to find documents containing words that start with occ and also contain the word health.
• Avoid using symbols such as "&" or "-" or "+". Also, parentheses have special meaning to the search engine.
• Beware of noise words. Single letters like "U" or "B" or "C", article words like "a" or "an" or "the", and prepositional words like "on" or "by" or "to" or "of", are of virtually no use to the search engine. These words appear in almost every document, and do nothing to clarify search expressions. This is why they are referred to as noise words. They are completely ignored unless they appear in double-quoted phrases. Try searching only on nouns or very unique word combinations, and avoid searching for specific quoted phrases that include noise words.
• Words like and, or and not have special meaning to the search engine. They are acceptable in double-quoted phrases, but will be interpreted as logical operators in other cases. For example, searching for phones not working will return all documents containing the word phones and not containing the word working. The correct way to specify this search is to double-quote it: "phones not working".
• Double-quotes can be used to specify that you are looking for an exact match. You can double-quote an entire search expression or just specific words. For example: phones "not working" has two of the three words double-quoted, and will return matching documents containing any variation of the word phone (such as phoned) and also containing the exact phrase "not working".
• The asterisk "*" is a wildcard character used to indicate that the search engine should match all words beginning with a prefix that you specify. This is called prefix matching. For example, searching for gastro* will find all documents containing the words gastroenterology, gastrointestinal or any other word starting with the prefix "gastro". Prefix matching will often return many more results than normal search queries, so try to include additional words to help specify more clearly what you are looking for.
• Be aware of spelling differences. Even though you may have spelled your search words correctly, they may not be spelled correctly in target documents. The search engine is capable of adapting to simple miss
• Try using synonyms. Think about words that the document authors might use to discuss topics. Sometimes you may need to get more abstract, like searching for weapon instead of gun or expiration instead of death. Certain documents use professional or political language and will not contain matches if you try and search for them using common or layman's terms, or politically incorrect terms.
• Use more than one word to specify what you are looking for, being sure to try and select terms that document authors would use when creating the content you are looking for. Optimal search queries often contain three or four words without double-quotes. Using fewer than three words generates too many matches, while using more than four words or double-quotes can easily exclude potential matches by accident.
• Remove double-quotes to help match suffix variations and instances where noise words in either the search phrase or the target documents might not be exactly the same.
• Expect to adjust your query a couple of times. If the first page of search results does not contain anything close to what you are looking for, then it's probably a sign that you need to alter your query using one of the techniques described here. The search engine is simply trying to find documents containing the words you specify, but it does not understand any of the content that it sees.
• Sometimes a document will be listed in the search results that does not contain any of the search words specified in the query, and in some cases these documents will be ranked above documents that do contain the specified search words. This happens because the search engine also considers text in links that point back to documents when calculating the search results. For example, searching on home will usually list Children's home page at the top of the list of search results even though the home page itself does not necessarily contain the word home, but every web page on Children's site contains a link back to the home page entitled home. Thus, the search engine considers Children's home page to be a good resource for searches on home since a vast number of links on the web site referencing that word actually link to the home page. This is known as backlinking and is weighted heavily when calculating a document's rank in the search results.