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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 "Born to 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: | white house, grant, first lady, george w. bush |
| After: | White House, Grant, First Lady, George W. Bush |
These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible
interpretations. For example, without capitalization,
grant could refer to financial grants and not Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth President of the United States.
Capitalization reduces the
ambiguity. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper
names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-).
| Before: | Roosevelt |
| After: | Roosevelt, -Theodore +Franklin |
Roosevelt alone is ambiguous. It it looking for information on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or
President Theodore Roosevelt? You can use the
reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the Theodore Roosevelt interpretation. Or, you can require that the word
"Franklin" be in the document. The after version
above does both.
Use a field specifier.
| Before: | President Bush to Visit Spain |
| After: | title:President Bush to Visit Spain |
If you are looking for a particular page that you know the
title, use the title: field
specifier to search for that the word or phrase in the title of
the page. See Special Searches for more
information on field specifiers.
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