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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
it slso 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. |
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