Scope
The newest of the major search
engines features a unique ability to
classify documents by topic and assign
them to custom folders based on each
individual search. A new relevancy ranking
technology is based on link popularity
and hypertext link information. It has
one of the largest databases of the
major search engines with 200 million
items and growing.
It also has a set of "Special
Collection" documents from about 5,500
sources including newswires, magazines
and databases. Searching this group
is free as is the bibliography and summary
provided. There is a charge to view
each full-text document. A free public
access version of government Web sites
in the usgovsearch database is also
provided.
Interface
You may choose to search either
the Web or Special Collection databases;
the default is All Sources. It sorts
the search results into Custom Search
folders based on keywords, source etc.
These results are divided into four
folder types. Subject is assigned based
on word occurrence and matches by keyword
and makes browsing a large output much
easier. Folders sorted by source are
based on top level domain, host name,
personal pages or the specific publication
in the Special Collection database.
The third folder, type of document,
is less-commonly encountered. Even less
often does the last folder type appear,
by language. Within the folders may
be subfolders. Field searching is available
for URL, title, pub, text and others
followed by a colon.
The other database, Special
Collection, is full-text articles, many
of which are not available elsewhere
on the Web. Publication Search lets
you search a specific publication in
this group. Power Search options include
searching for words in document title
or URL, date range, specific countries,
and even sort results by date. Source
limits, language and document type limits
can also be specified. Industry search
allows 26 group choices.
Logic
- In searching the default word is and between words.
- Boolean terms or and not may be inserted between words or phrases
in quotes.
- Phrase searching requires quotation
marks around each phrase.
- Truncation is automatic. You
may use an asterisk (*) but plurals
will be searched with entry of singular
words. A % sign can represent a single character
either internally or at the end of
a word after a minimum of four characters.
- A + sign before
a word or phrase in quotes indicates
must include; a - sign is an eliminate-entirely situation.
- Case sensitivity is limited to putting
exact case match records ahead of
other retrieved records in the results
list.
Results
Ten hits are the default supplied
at a time from a search. This engine
gives the title of the document, percent
ranking, type of Web site or document,
summary, source date and URL. Results
are clustered by site and publication.
A list of the folders is provided on
the left-hand side with Special Collection
as the first one if you searched in
that database. |
