The
Basic Search
To
enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press
the Enter key or click the Search button for
a list of relevant results.
World
eBook Library uses sophisticated text-matching techniques
to find pages that are both important and relevant to
your search. For instance, World Public Library analyzes
not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking
into it to determine the value of the candidate page for
your search. World Public Library also prefers pages in
which your query terms are near each other.
Note:
Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted to HTML
for indexing; however, the HTML is not displayed.
Spelling
A
single spelling suggestion is returned with the results
for queries where the spell checker has detected a possible
spelling mistake.
The
spell checker feature is context sensitive. For example,
if the query submitted is "gail divers," "gail devers"
is suggested as an alternative query. However, "scuba
divers" would not return an alternate query suggestion.
Note:
Currently, the spell checker supports only US English.
Synonyms
Synonyms
are other words that have the same or similar meanings.
They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the
results page.
.
Sorting
by Date
The
Sort by Date feature sorts and presents your search
results based on date. The date of each file is returned
in the results. Results that do not contain dates are displayed
at the end, sorted by relevance.
Automatic
"and" Queries
By
default, World Public Library only returns pages that include
all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and"
between terms. For example, to search for engineering product
specification documents, enter:
To
broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more
terms.
"OR"
Searches
World
eBook Library supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve
pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase
"OR" between terms. For example, to search for an office
in either London or Paris, enter:
See
Your Search Terms in the Results
Every
World Public Library search result lists one or more excerpts
from the web page to display how your search terms are used
in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search terms
are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine
if that result is from a page you want to visit.
Does
Capitalization Matter?
World
eBook Library searches are not case sensitive. All
letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood
as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington,"
"George Washington," and "George washington" all return
the same results.
Does
World Public Library Observe Stop Words?
World
eBook Library ignores common words and characters known
as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles.
World eBook Library automatically disregards such terms
as "where" and "how," as well as certain single digits and
single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search
and can significantly slow searching. If you want to use
stop words in your search, use the "+" sign or enclose your
phrase containing stop words in quotation marks. Make sure
that you include a space before the "+" sign.
For
example, to search for Annual Report Version I:
You
can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.
Does
World Public Library Use Stemming?
To
provide the most accurate results, World Public Library
does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches.
Rather, World Public Library searches for exactly the words
that you enter into the search box.
For
example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not
yield "airline" or "airlines.". If in doubt, try both
forms, for example: "airline" and "airlines."
Refining
Your Search
Since
World Public Library only returns web pages that contain
all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing
your search is as simple as adding more words to the search
terms you have already entered. The refined query returns
a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your
original broad query.
Excluding
Words
You
can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign
("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude.
Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.
For
example, the search:
will
return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."
Phrase
Searches
You
can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words
enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together
in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation
marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific
names.
Certain
characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors
work like quotes because they join your search words in
the same way double quotes join your search words. For
example, the search:
is
treated as a phrase search even though the search words
are not enclosed in double quotes. World Public Library
recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and
apostrophes as phrase connectors.
Restricted
Searches
You
may also narrow searches by restricting queries in certain
ways.
| Restrict
Type |
Query
Syntax |
Example |
| to
a given location on your site |
allinurl;
allintitle; inurl; intitle |
allinurl:World
eBook Library help
see Advanced
Operators for details |
| to
specific domains |
site: |
site:World
eBook Library.com
see Advanced
Operators for details |
| to
specific file types like Excel spreadsheets, PDFf
docs, etc. |
filetype: |
filetype:pdf |
Directory
Restricting
To restrict
the directories searched, enter a URL that drills down through
the directory structure to the directories or files to be
searched. For example, the query [World Public Library.com/manual/]
restricts the search to everything at the manual level.
If the trailing slash is not included, as in [World
eBook Library.com/manual], then all subdirectories
are also searched.
Advanced
Operators
World
eBook Library Search supports several advanced operators,
which are query words with special functions. A list of
the advanced operators with explanation are provided below.
cache:
The search engine keeps the text of the many documents it
crawls available in a backed-up format known as "cache."
A cached version of a web page can be retrieved if the original
page is unavailable (for example, the page's server is down).
The cached page appears exactly as it looked when the crawler
last crawled it and includes a message (at the top of the
page) to indicate that it's a cached version of the page.
The
query [cache:] shows the cached version of the
web page. For instance, [cache:www.World Public Library.com]
shows the cached page of World Public Library's homepage.
Note:
There can be no space between cache: and the web
page URL in the query.
If you
include other words in the query, those words will be highlighted
within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.World
eBook Library.com press releases] shows the cached
content with the words "press" and "releases" highlighted.
info:
The query [info:] returns all information available
for that particular URL. For instance, [info:www.World
eBook Library.com] shows information about the World
eBook Library homepage. Note there can be no space between
the info: and the web page URL.
site:
If you include [site:] in your query, the results
are restricted to those websites in the given domain. For
instance, [help site:www.World Public Library.com]
finds pages about help within www.World Public Library.com.
[help site:com] finds pages about help within .com
URLs.
Note:
There can be no space between the "site:" and the
domain.
link:
The query [link:] enables you to restrict your
search to all pages that link to the query page. To do this,
use the [link:sampledomain.com] syntax in the search
box.
For
example, to find all links to Stanford's main page, enter:
allintitle:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], the results
are restricted to documents with all of the query words
in the document's HTML title. For example, [allintitle:
World eBook Library search] only returns documents
that have both "World Public Library" and "search" in the
HTML title.
intitle:
If you include [intitle:] in your query, the search
is restricted to results with documents containing that
word in the HTML title. For example, [intitle:World
Public Library search] returns documents that mention
the word "World eBook Library" in their HTML title, and
mention the word "search" anywhere in the document either
in the title or anywhere else in the document.
Note:
There can be no space between the "intitle:" and the following
word.
Putting
[intitle:] in front of every word in your query
is equivalent to putting [allintitle:] at the front
of your query. For example, [intitle:World Public Library
intitle:search] is the same as [allintitle: World
eBook Library search].
allinurl:
If you start a query with [allinurl:], the search
is restricted to results with all of the query words in
the URL. For example, [allinurl: World Public Library
search] returns only documents that have both "World
Public Library" and "search" in the URL.
Note:
[allinurl:] works on words, not URL components.
In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, [allinurl:
foo/bar] restricts the results to page with the words
"foo" and "bar" in the URL, but doesn't require that they
be separated by a slash within that URL, that they be adjacent,
or that they be in that particular word order. There is
currently no way to enforce these constraints.
inurl:
If you include [inurl:] in your query, the results
are restricted to documents containing that word in the
URL. For example, [inurl:World Public Library search]
returns documents that mention the word "World Public Library"
in their URL and mention the word "search" anywhere in the
document either in the URL or anywhere else in the document.
Note:
There can be no space between the "inurl:" and the following
word.
Note:
[inurl:] works on words, not URL components. In
particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, in the query [World
eBook Library inurl:foo/bar], the inurl: operator
affects only the word "foo," which is the single word following
the inurl: operator, and does not affect the word
"bar." The query [World Public Library inurl:foo inurl:bar]
can be used to require both "foo" and "bar" to be in the
URL.
Putting
[inurl:] in front of every word in your query is
equivalent to putting [allinurl:] at the front
of your query. For example, [inurl:World Public Library
inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl: World Public
Library search].
.
©
2007 World Public Library, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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