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Terms
Search
Terms are the things that you enter into the search form that tell the
search engine what things to look for in the papers at this site. The search
engine immediately breaks the terms up into individual words and find all
papers that have each word in them (a Boolean OR or NOT search would work
differently). The terms should be entered as simple words (or numbers),
not in quotations nor separated by commas or other symbols. Each one of
your search terms should be keywords specific to a paper you need. Finally,
remember to make sure your search terms are spelled correctly or the search
engine will not find any matches (assuming the words are spelled correctly
in the papers). You can check spelling online at WWWebster's
Dictionary.
Stopwords
Since
our search is designed to be lightning-fast and extremely accurate, it
is programmed to scan every query and weed out words that are either too
short to be of importance or words that occur so often in each paper that
they become useless in narrowing down your request. Currently our search
engine ignores any word whose length is less than three letters long (i.e.
"the" is not ignored but "it" would be) and ignores
any word that appears in over 80% of papers in that section. Anytime a
word is ignored for either reason, this will be displayed at the top of
your results and your results will be papers that have the un-ignored words
in them.
Boolean
Matches
By
default, our search matches a series of words separated by spaces using
the Boolean AND match type. This means that if your query is "vietnam
war", the search will only find you the papers that have in them "vietnam"
AND "war". This is the best match type in most cases, but if
you have a special search specification, our search allows you to use the
OR and NOT Boolean match types as well.
Russia
OR Communism
- Papers that contain either the word "Russia" or "Communism".
Russia
NOT Communism - Papers that contain the word "Russia" but
not "Communism"
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