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COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR

Jerry Pournelle

Thursday, February 06, 2003

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From a letter from Bob Thompson who discovered the search engine and helped me get it installed:

I've been watching the searches that your users have been doing. A lot of them are assuming an implicit "and" when they search, e.g. entering the search string:

larry niven

or

larry and niven

assuming that it will find all pages that contain "larry niven" when in fact atomz does an implicit "or", which makes that string look for any pages that contain larry *or* niven in the first case, and ones that contain larry *or* and *or* niven in the second.

You should probably tell your readers that it's an implicit "or" and that to find a string they should enclose that string in double quotes. They can also use standard AltaVista syntax to require or forbid search terms, e.g.:

+larry +niven

finds all pages that contain both larry *and* niven (including those that contain the terms together or separated), or

+larry -niven

finds all pages that contain larry but *not* niven.

Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com

 http://www.ttgnet.com