Xavatoria Search Tips: Examples

Translated: require myeloma OR antibodies

Finds any documents containing either of the terms "myeloma" or "antibodies".

Translated: require myeloma AND antibodies

Finds only documents containing both the terms "myeloma" and "antibodies".
Does not find documents containing only one of the search terms.

Translated: require FISH, require technique

Finds any documents containing the terms "technique" and "FISH" or "fish" on the same page.

Translated: forbid APAAP, require technique

Finds any document containing "technique", providing it does not also contain the term "APAAP" or "apaap".

Translated: prefer myeloid, require leukaemia

Finds documents containing "leukaemia", and will return documents containing both "myeloid" and "leukaemia" higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase diagnostic techniques

Finds "diagnostic techniques".
Does not find "histology techniques", "PCR techniques" or "techniques".

Translated: require leukaemia, require words starting with basophil

Finds documents containing "leukaemia" and "basophil", "basophils", "basophilic" and "basophilia".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any number of characters (see below).

Translated: require leukaemia, forbid myeloma, prefer morphology

Would preferentially list documents with content "morphology" and "leukaemia", then documents containing "leukaemia".
Would not list documents with content "myeloma".

Translated: ignores common words like 'search', 'for', 'and' 'the'; requires words beginning with lympho

Finds "lymphoma", "lymphomas", "lymphoid", "lymphocyte", "lymphoblastic", etc.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph. It can represent zero, up to an unlimited number of letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

Search relevance factors are calculated as follows. Each search term which finds a match in a web page is allocated a value of '1'. If the term appears in the page description, a weighting is given to the relevance factor, and if the term appears in the title, a higher weighting is applied. Finally, if two or more matches are found and the search was conducted with 'Match' set to 'all', a further weighting is given to the relevance factor. The weighting calculations are cumulative, so the highest relevance factor will therefore match pages with two or more search terms which appear in both Title and Description, and the lowest relevance factor with only a single search term matching text but not Title or Description.

---

The Xavatoria Search Engine is Copyright 1997 by Fluid Dynamics.
Visit the Xavatoria Search Page for help files and most recent version.