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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.
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Full-text index:
An index containing every word of every document cataloged,
including stop words (defined below).
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Fuzzy search:
A search that will find matches even when words are only
partially spelled or misspelled.
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Index:
The searchable catalog of documents created by search
engine software. Also called "catalog." Index
is often used as a synonym for search engine. Index is
commonly pluralized as "indices." However, Search
Engine Watch instead uses the alternative plural form
"indexes."
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Keyword search:
A search for documents containing one or more words
that are specified by a user.
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Phrase search:
A search for documents containing a exact sentence or
phrase specified by a user.
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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%.
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Proximity search:
A search where users to specify that documents returned
should have the words near each other.
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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."
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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%.
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Relevancy:
How well a document provides the information a user
is looking for, as measured by the user.
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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.
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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.
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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
stem word "swim."
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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.
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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.
Available in English and other several
other language, this is a list of terms compiled by readers
of the I-Search mailing list. It is especially oriented toward
search engine marketing terms.
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