| EMPIRE STATE COLLEGE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES |
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Refining Your Keyword Search (Return to top?)
| Typing any of these | Finds |
| NOT not ! | documents that do not contain the condition or word following NOT |
| AND and & | documents that contain both the conditions or words separated by AND |
| OR or | | documents that contain either of the conditions or words separated by OR |
| ACCRUE accrue , (comma) | the same documents as OR, but increases the relevance ranking of a document when the document contains more than one matching conditon or word |
| @ | documents which contain both of the words that are separated by @, as long as the words are next to each other in the documents. (Do not place spaces between @ and either word.) |
For Example:
| Typing this text | Finds documents that contain |
| cat & dog & fish | all three of these words |
| cat | dog | fish | at least one of these words |
| cat, dog, fish | at least one of these words. Notes gives higher relevance to documents that contain two or three of these words |
| dog@fish | dog and fish next to each other |
| (dog AND cat) OR fish | dog and cat; fish |
| dog AND (cat OR fish) | dog and cat; dog and fish |
| dog AND NOT (cat OR fish) | dog, as long as they don't also contain cat or fish |
Changing the Relevance Ranking of Individual Search Words
If your database has a full text index, you can use the Termweight operator to change the relevance ranking of search words, thus increasing or decreasing their importance in the search. Documents in which the search text is most important appear at the top of the list of search results (when you sort the results by relevance).
To use the Termweight operator, type your search text as follows:
For Example:
The table below shows some examples of using the Termweight operator to change the relevance ranking of search words.
| Search text | Results of search |
| termweight 70 video or termweight 30 audio | Finds documents that contain "video" or "audio" or both. Gives a much higher relevance to "video" than to "audio." |
| termweight 25 photo or termweight 75 audio or termweight 50 video | Finds documents that contain any of the words "photo," "audio," or "video." Gives the highest relevance to "audio," the next highest relevance to "video," and the least relevance to "photo." |
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