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| Keywords |
- Type your keywords in the "search" text box, separating them by spaces.
- A keyword can be made of any combination of letters and digits, excepting spaces and other separators like punctuation signs, parentheses, etc).
- The number of keywords is not limited, but experience shows that more relevant results are obtained with less than 5 keywords.
The more you enter keywords, the more restrictive is your query, and the less it yields results.
On the contrary, if you type in only one keyword, you are likely to get too many results, a situation not easy to take advantage of.
It is advisable to iteratively refine the queries, each time with a few keywords.
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| Spelling |
- Noematics REFLEXION automatically takes into account the grammatical forms of a same keyword: for example, you will get identical results if you type in English horse or horses, ox or oxen.
You may disable this functionality within the Advanced Search form (see "Grammatical forms").
- In French and in other languages with accented letters you may forget the accents, in most cases without any loss of relevance in the results.
If you have any doubt about spelling of such words, just replace all accented characters in a word by their unaccented equivalents.
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| Wild cards |
- Noematics REFLEXION accepts the wild card '*' at the end of a word. For example, if you type the key word "house*", Noematics REFLEXION will search all words beginning by "house", and will retrieve all documents containing any of the words "house", "houses", "household", etc.
- The wild card is not accepted at the begining of, or inside, a word. It cannot be used with other characters than "*" (like "%" or "?").
- When using a wild card, the "Grammatical (inflected) forms" option should be activated, which is the default case in simple search. If that functionality is not enabled, please click on "Advanced Search" in the search form, then go to the "Inflected forms" block to activate it.
- The wild card is useful when you want to search over a set of words with a common beginning, but do not want to choose among them.
- If you need to use wild cards, be aware that they slow down the search process. That is why Noematics REFLEXION asks you to type again your request if the wild card brings back too many keywords.
- The wild card includes the "Grammatical forms" functionality, but usually brings back much more results.
- In many cases, instead of using a wild card, you might let Noematics REFLEXION work with the "Grammatical forms" option, which is more efficient.
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| The request (simple search) |
- Noematics REFLEXION processes the query as soon as the user has clicked on the "Search" button or hit the "Enter" key.
It takes into account all current keywords (and selected options in case of an advanced search).
- Boolean "AND" operator by default: do not use the word "AND" in queries : when analyzing the contents of the "search" text box, REFLEXION assumes that all the keywords are linked by the "AND" boolean operator: that means that it will retrieve all indexed documents weach of them containing all the keywords, and only those.
- Boolean "OR" operator: do not use the word "OR" in queries : REFLEXION uses instead parentheses. Any set of keywords between 2 parentheses are considered by REFLEXION as linked by the operator "OR"
Example: searching for "a house in mountains either in France or in Switzerland" will yield the following query in the search text box:
"house mountain (France Switzerland)"
which could be written:
"house AND mountain AND (France OR Switzerland)"
A query may contain several couples of parentheses of same level, but not embedded parentheses.
- If the "Grammatical forms" option is enabled (which is the case in simple search), each keyword might be present in a document under anyone of its grammatical forms: which technically means that the "OR" boolean operator applies to the set of such forms of each keywords (for details, please see the Advanced Search section).
The same situation applies to the set of words derived from a wild card word.
- In each language, Noematics REFLEXION holds a list of "banal words" like for example "a", "the" in English. Those words are not taken into account by the Search Engine when analyzing the query (except for some advanced search options). Only the Intranet or Web Site Administrator may modify the list of banal words.
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