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help
It's easy to search with Inktomi Search. Just type in a few words
or phrases. Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be
found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the
better results you'll get. Here are some examples:
Search by typing words and phrases.
example: Host
of All Things Considered
For this search, Inktomi Search will find documents containing
as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the
documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't
worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the
words in your search -- Inktomi Search returns relevant results
even if they don't contain all query terms.
Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate
with commas.
example: Host of "All Things Considered",
"Morning Edition"
A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches
those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple
phrases or proper names with a comma.
Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.
example: David Brown, Marketplace
Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise,
an exact case match is used. For example, marketplace will find
matches for marketplace andMarketplace, whereas a query forMarketplace
will only matchMarketplace.
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refining a search
It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want.
Here are some effective techniques to try:
Identify a phrase.
Before: home run records
After: "home run" records
The before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for the home page
of songs like "Run, Run, Run" or baseball statistics?
Identifying "home run" as a phrase eliminates the ambiguity.
This is the most powerful query refinement technique.
Add a discriminating word or a phrase.
Before: "home run" records
After: "home run" records baseball
As before, the before query is ambiguous. Adding baseball makes
the query less ambiguous. You'll get more total matches (because
the query is broadened with an additional term), but the relevance
ranking will be better.
Capitalize when appropriate.
Before: wired digital white house, baby
bells, bill gates
After: Wired, Digital, White House, Baby
Bells, Bill Gates
These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible
interpretations. For example, without capitalization, wired could
refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could
refer to the Bells' children on the "Young and the Restless."
Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. It is always a good idea to
capitalize proper names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-).
Before: Barney
After: Barney, +Smith -dinosaur
Barney alone is ambiguous. Is it looking for Smith Barney investment
information or cartoon dinosaur pages? You can use the reject operator
(the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation.
Or, you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document.
The after version above does both.
Use a field specifier.
Before: Sun workstation
After: Sun workstation, site:sun.com, title:Ultra
If you are looking for a particular page that you know the site
or title, use the site: ortitle: field specifier to search for that
the word or phrase in the site or title of the page. SeeSpecial
Searches for more information on field specifiers
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special searches
You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents
by using Inktomi Search field syntax. This allows you to search
for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, and any additional
information defined with an HTML meta tag. The field name should
be in lower case, and immediately followed by a colon. There should
be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.
link:www.inktomi.com
Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with www.inktomi.com
in its URL. For example, you can use
+ link:www.inktomi.com
- site:www.inktomi.com
to see how many external links point to the Inktomi Corporation
website. Some search engines call this feature "searching backwards".
site:sun.com
Finds pages on the web site sun.com. The sitefield search examines
the "site" part of the URL only. Therefore, site:sun.com
will find such sites as java.sun.com, www.sun.com andplayground.sun.com,
but won't match any site that ends in sun.co.uk. You can use the
site field search to bring up all pages at a particular web site.
url:bar
Finds pages with the word bar anywhere in the page's URL. For example:
http://www.foo.com/bar.html
You can also use the url field selection to find out the exact number
of pages currently in the database. Just type url:http. This number
updated as pages are added and removed from our database.
title:"The New
York Times"
Finds pages with the phrase "The New York Times" in the
title portion of the document.
likes:chocolate
Finds pages with an HTML meta tag with namelikes and with content
containing chocolate. For example: <meta name="likes"
content="beer chocolate movies long walks">
This is an example of a field defined by an HTML meta tag. There
is nothing special about the wordlikes. Any search field can be
defined with a meta tag, as long as the name of the field is a single
word made from all small letters.
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