Keyword(s): Match: All Any Boolean Format: Long Short Sort by: Score Title Reverse Score Reverse Title For a quick search enter your keyword(s) in the text box and press the Search button. For a more advanced search set Match to Boolean and use the logical operators AND & OR. You can combine them with parentheses. i.e. - you can search for: (undergraduate and requirements) or admissions. How this Search Engine Works The search engine gets a list of words from this HTML form that invoked it. If the search engine was invoked with boolean matching enabled, it will do a quick syntax check on the input words. If there are syntax errors, it will display the syntax error. If the boolean matching was not enabled, the list of words is converted into a boolean expression by putting either "and"s or "or"s between the words. (This depends on the search type. Any=or; All=and) The search engine also uses an endings algorithm which will convert a word like "person" into "person or persons". In this fashion, all the specified algorithms are used on each of the words and the result is a new boolean expression. The next step is to perform database lookups on the words in the expression. The result of these lookups are then passed to the boolean expression parser. The boolean expression parser knows how to deal with "not", "and", "or" and parenthesis. The result of the parser will be one set of matches. Note that the operator "not" is used as the word 'without' and is binary: You can not write "cat and not dog" or just "not dog" but you can write "cat not dog". At this point, the matches are ranked. The rank of a match is determined by the weight of the words that caused the match and the weight of the algorithm that generated the word. Word weights are generally determined by the importance of the word in a document. For example, words in the title of a document have a much higher weight than words at the bottom of the document. Finally, when the document ranks have been determined and the documents sorted, the resulting matches are displayed. If paged output is required, only a subset of all the matches will be displayed. top Search Residence Life Copyright © College of Charleston. All Rights Reserved.