Search Skills

  • Basic concepts for database searching. Concepts and terminology useful in thinking about search engines. See also the larger glossary.
  • Search operator comparison. A one page table comparing basic search operators in various search engines.
  • Search tips, part 1. Elementary topics like metadata and controlled vocabulary; precision vs recall; how to find better search terms; how to retrieve more or less in a bibliographic database; how to group or combine terms.
  • Search tips, part 2. More on searching a controlled vocabulary database. Single search and synonymy and polysemy. Undisclosed and unexpected automatic processing.
  • Search tips, part 3. Searching natural language document sets. Relevance ranking. The future.