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Sheet
Search Engine Terms
Boolean search: A
search allowing the inclusion or exclusion of documents containing certain
words through the use of operators such as AND, NOT and OR.
Concept search: A search
for documents related conceptually to a word, rather than specifically
containing the word itself.
Full-text index: An index
containing every word of every document cataloged, including stop words
(defined below).
Fuzzy search: A search
that will find matches even when words are only partially spelled or misspelled.
Index: The searchable
catalog of documents created by search engine software. Also called "catalog."
Index is often used as a synonym for search engine.
Keyword search: A search
for documents containing one or more words that are specified by a user.
Phrase search: A search
for documents containing a exact sentence or phrase specified by a user.
Precision: The degree
in which a search engine lists documents matching a query. The more matching
documents that are listed, the higher the precision. For example, if a
search engine lists 80 documents found to match a query but only 20 of
them contain the search words, then the precision would be 25%.
Proximity search: A search
where users to specify that documents returned should have the words near
each other.
Query-By-Example: A search
where a user instructs an engine to find more documents that are similar
to a particular document. Also called "find similar."
Recall: Related to precision,
this is the degree in which a search engine returns all the matching documents
in a collection. There may be 100 matching documents, but a search engine
may only find 80 of them. It would then list these 80 and have a recall
of 80%.
Relevancy: How well a
document provides the information a user is looking for, as measured by
the user.
Search Engine: The software
that searches an index and returns matches. Search engine is often used
synonymously with spider and index, although these are separate components
that work with the engine.
Spider: The software
that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. Spider
is often used as a synonym for search engine.
Stemming: The ability
for a search to include the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows
a user to enter "swimming" and get back results also for the word stem
word "swim."
Stop words: Conjunctions,
prepositions and articles and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear
often in documents yet alone may contain little meaning.
Thesaurus: A list of
synonyms a search engine can use to find matches for particular words
if the words themselves don't appear in documents.
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