Connecticut Office of Brownfield Remediation and Development

How to Use the ctbrownfields Site-wide Search
Quick Tips and Examples Refining a Search Special Searches Requiring or Excluding Terms

Quick Tips and Examples

It's easy to search with ctbrownfields Search. Just type in a few words or phrases. Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the better results you'll get. Here are some examples:

Search by typing words and phrases.

Pentium computer with 8x CD-ROM for sale

Inktomi Search will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- ctbrownfields Search returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.

Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with commas.

Pentium computer with "8x CD-ROM", "for sale"

A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.

Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.

Steve Jobs, NeXT

Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will only match NeXT.

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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 "Run, Run, 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: wired digital white house, baby bells, bill gates

After: Wired, Digital, White House, Baby Bells, Bill Gates

These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible interpretations. For example, without capitalization, wired could refer to electrical cables and not Wired Magazine. baby bells could refer to the Bells' children on the "Young and the Restless." Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper names.

Use a require or reject operator (+,-).

Before: Barney

After: Barney, +Smith -dinosaur

Barney alone is ambiguous. It it looking for Smith Barney investment information or cartoon dinosaur pages? You can use the reject operator (the "minus" sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation. Or, you can require that the word "Smith" be in the document. The after version above does both.

Use a field specifier.

Before: Sun workstation

After: Sun workstation, site:sun.com, title:Ultra

If you are looking for a particular page that you know the site or title, use the site: or title: field specifier to search for that the word or phrase in the site or title of the page.

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Special Searches

You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using ctbrownfields Search field syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, and any additional information defined with a HTML meta tag. The field name should be in lower case, and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.

Examples

link:www.state.pa.us
Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with www.state.pa.us in its URL. For example, you can use +link:www.state.pa.us -site:www.state.pa.us to see how many external links point to the State of Pennsylvania's website. Some search engines call this feature "searching backwards".

site:sun.com
Finds pages on the web site sun.com. The site field search examines the "site" part of the URL only. Therefore, site:sun.com will find such sites as java.sun.com, www.sun.com and playground.sun.com, but won't match any site that ends in sun.co.uk. You can use the site field search to bring up all pages at a particular web site.

url:bar
Finds pages with the word bar anywhere in the page's URL. For example:

http://www.foo.com/bar.html

title:"The New York Times"
Finds pages with the phrase "The New York Times" in the title portion of the document.

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Requiring or Excluding Terms

ctbrownfields Search has a simple query syntax which gives you the pinpoint search power of Boolean logic, without having to remember complex queries. The table below shows the ctbrownfields Search operators that correspond to Boolean operators:

ctbrownfields Search
operator Boolean
equivalent

default operator:
you need not use any special symbols OR

+ AND

- NOT

phrase operator:
enclose the phrase with double quotation marks ADJ

Boolean queries use the logical operators AND, OR, NOT and ADJ (adjacent). Suppose you wanted to find plain paper color laser printers made by companies other than HP. This query can be specified in Boolean logic as:

(laser ADJ printer) AND (color OR (plain ADJ paper)) AND NOT (HP OR Hewlett-Packard)

Using ctbrownfields Search operators, the complex query above may be typed into the search box as:

+"laser printer" color "plain paper" -HP, -Hewlett-Packard

This query specifies that:

All returned documents must contain the phrase "laser printer".
Documents containing one or more of the terms "laser printer", color, or "plain paper" will be ranked at the top (the more terms matched, the higher the ranking).
None of the documents returned will contain either HP or Hewlett-Packard.

Statistical Weighting and ctbrownfields Search Searches
A traditional Boolean search returns an unsorted list of all items that match the search condition. ctbrownfields Search goes considerably beyond this by using advanced statistical search technology to return the results sorted with the "best" matches listed at the top. Unlike plain Boolean searches, ctbrownfields Search automatically weights your query terms based on their statistical uniqueness. Common terms, such as "shall," get a much lower weighting than less frequently occurring terms, such as the phrase "golf courses."

ctbrownfields Search's advanced statistical weighting allows you to just type in relevant words and phrases, and the system will provide the answer to your query in the top few documents! Since there are cases in which it is convenient to narrow a query using Boolean operators, ctbrownfields Search Server allows you to use the + and - Boolean operators. With ctbrownfields Search, you get the accurate ranking of statistical searching combined with the information filtering of Boolean searching.

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