Searching
NCR Online’s Past Issues
NCR
Online’s search engine gives you the ability to do sophisticated
searches, or queries, without complicated programming language.
A
query is simply a description of information you want to find.
Unlike search engines that look only for documents that contain all
the words in your query, NCR Online’s search engine looks for
documents that are a best match for the words in your query.
The search engine will also hunt for documents that are about the same
concepts your query describes, so sometimes you’ll see results
that don’t mention any of the words in your original
query.
What
this means is that your query can be as detailed as you like. Don’t
worry about providing too many words; the more words, the better.
Additional words in your query will help NCR Online’s search
engine figure out what concepts you’re really interested in. On
the other hand, it also does a pretty good job of figuring out what
documents are interesting to you even if your query is vague.
Tips
for Effective Searching
Only
use words that are relevant to your query. If you’re looking
for information about Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, don’t enter a
query like “Find me all documents about Joseph Cardinal
Bernardin”. Remember -- NCR Online’s search engine
considers all the words in your query to be part of the
information you’re after. So queries like the previous example
will find all documents about finding all documents about
Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, which may not be exactly what you want.
Specify
multiple forms of the same phrases. NCR Online’s search
engine distinguishes between hyphenated and non-hyphenated words. So,
sometimes it might be necessary to specify that you want both
versions, as in “CDROM CD-ROM”. The search engine
will try to figure out that CDROM and CD-ROM are
the same, but it never hurts to specify multiple forms.
Common
words are ignored. NCR Online’s search engine doesn’t
look for common words like a, and, or the. As
a result, those words in your query will be ignored. The search engine
also ignores numbers (however, it can find strings that happen to
contain a number, such as 3M. |
