Information Locator Tips

BPA's Web Site uses the Microsoft Index Server as a search engine. To search for information you formulate a query by filling in the fields of a query form. The Web server forwards the query form to the query engine which finds the pertinent documents and returns the results as a Web page. The follow excerpts from the Index Server Guide cover the basics about how it works and how to use it effectively.

In addition to the basic features, other features let you:

• Search for words or phrases near another word or phrase.
• Search for words and phrases within textual properties. (for example, @DocAuthor Sally) Search for properties with <, <=, =, =>, > against a constant. (for example,. DATE > 1/1/95).
• Apply Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT.
• Search with wild cards (for example, "*", "?" and regular expressions).

Search Criteria (Restrictions)

With Index Server you can search for multiple words and phrases within documents as well as words and phrases near other words and phrases. Index Server also provides free-text queries. With free-text queries, you can enter any set of words or phrases, or even a complete sentence, as the query restriction. Index Server will examine this text, identify all the nouns and noun phrases, and post a query using those terms. For example, assume you typed the following free-text query:

The Fulton County Grand Jury said Friday an investigation of Atlanta's recent primary election produced no evidence that any irregularities took place.

Index Server identifies the following words and noun phrases:

• Words: Fulton, county, grand, jury, Friday, investigation, Atlanta, recent, primary, election, produce, evidence, irregularity
• Phrases: Fulton county grand jury, primary election, grand jury, Atlanta's recent primary election

These words and phrases are combined into a restriction, weighted for proper ranking, and posted as a query.

You can use the standard comparison operators in queries. These include =, >, <, >=, <=, and != (not equal) for numeric and textual properties. In addition, for textual properties all the content query functionality is available. With Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) and parentheses, you can freely mix restriction terms.

Fuzzy Queries

Index Server supports fuzzy queries, which contain simple wildcards (such as those in MS-DOS®) and matches regular expressions (from UNIX®) against textual properties. Content queries support simple-prefix matching (for example, "dog*" will return "dogmatic" and "doghouse"). Index Server also supports linguistic stemming, which matches inflected and base forms of query words. (For example, "swim**" is expanded to "swimming," "swam," "swum," and so on.) Although Index Server does not support true natural language processing, it supports free-text mode.

Tips for Searching

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase, but you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results.

• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.
• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.
• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not surfing the Net, write the following query: surfing AND NOT the Net
• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example: Abbott OR Costello. This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.
• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want Index Server to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query: "system near manager". Index Server will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks: system near manager. Index Server searches all documents for the words system and manager.

At a Glance | News & Events | Contact Us | Help & Info | Getting a Job
Doing Business with BPA | Publications | Power of the Columbia
Environment, Fish & Wildlife | Power Business | Transmission Business | Energy Efficiency
Having Problems With This Site?

conditions and disclaimer