Help with searching

Searches can be run using one or more search terms. The results of your search will be automatically sorted with the most relevant results first. Please note that the minimum length of words that will be found is four characters. Searches are case-insensitive. Please note that searches will not work if there are only a couple of records to search.

How relevance is assessed

Every correct word in the collection and in the query is weighted according to its significance in the query or collection. This way, a word that is present in many documents will have lower weight (and may even have a zero weight), because it has lower semantic value in this particular collection. Otherwise, if the word is rare, it will receive a higher weight. The weights of the words are then combined to compute the relevance of an item.

Boolean searching

The boolean full-text search capability supports the following operators:

+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every row returned.
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any row returned.
*
An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word, not prepended.
"
The phrase, that is enclosed in double quotes ", matches only rows that contain this phrase literally, as it was typed.

And here are some examples:

apple banana
find rows that contain at least one of these words.
+apple +juice
... both words.
+apple macintosh
... word "apple", but rank it higher if it also contain "macintosh".
+apple -macintosh
... word "apple" but not "macintosh".
apple*
... "apple", "apples", "applesauce", and "applet".
"some words"
... "some words of wisdom", but not "some noise words".

Please note that Boolean searches are not ranked by relevance.

Scope of searches

The search facility searches either the whole site (if you start from the general Search page) or a specific category of information (if you search from within a section, e.g. products). The general site search does not cover Forum discussions.