Summary

After a search that results in matches, a summary is displayed along with the results of that search. The summary displays your query (including logic and case settings) and the number of matches it has found. It also lists how many pages and images it searched. Finally, depending on the number of matches found, controls for navigating through the results are presented.

Timer

You may notice a statement similar to the following when the results are displayed, "Search completed in 0.08 seconds".You should note that the time displayed here is the time taken by the server to complete its search of the available pages. This is NOT the same as the time it may take for the results to be displayed in your browser. When the search is complete, the resulting page still has to be sent to your computer and this could take several seconds as it is affected by many factors including the speed of your computer, the bandwidth available and the current volume of network traffic (Intranet or Internet).

Probability Scoring

Each result is displayed with the number of keyword matches and a "probability". These two variables are used to estimate the relevancy of the matches returned to you. The higher the probability and match scores, the more relevant the result is likely to be in relation to your enquiry (or keyword(s)). You may notice that in certain cases a particular result might have a higher probability score than another, even though the other has a greater number of keyword matches. The reason for this is that the probability score is based on an analysis of the matches and their position (context) within their host documents.

Stop Words

The search engine ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "the", as well as certain single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results. These are called "stop words" and are common to most search engines. The search engine will indicate if a stop word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page within the summary.

If the stopped word is necessary, you can defeat the mechanism by conducting a search with "phrase" logic, which simply means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search. Furthermore, when you are using wildards in your search query, stop words are ignored if the wildcarded word matches them, that is - a search for "th*" will match on "the", "there", etc.

Related Pages: 1.0.1: Advanced Search 1.0.0: Using the Search Engine