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Search Tips
Note: The Broadband Week site search is based on the
Verity® search engine.
Basic Queries
Enter basic queries as a series of single words or phrases, separated by
commas. The search will return documents which contain any of those words
or any of those phrases. It will score each document according to how many
matching words and phrases it contains. For example, if you enter the query...
film, movie, location, sound stage
...documents containing the phrase "sound stage" or the word "location" or
the word "film" or the word "movie" will be found. Those dealing with shooting
theatrical movies, either on a sound stage or on locaton, will have a high
score. Those dealing with other aspects of the film industry will have lower
scores. Those dealing with thin layers of oil on roadways are likely to be
scored even lower.
Case does not matter--the query above will find documents containing
"film", "Film" and "FILM". It will also find words which are stemmed
variations: "films" and "filmed" for example.
This is all that you need to know, unless you wish to assemble
sophisticated queries. If you do, read on.
Logical Operators
Operators can be used to make queries more specific. For example...
film AND movie AND location AND sound stage
...will exclude documents about other aspects of the film industry (and
about oil on roadways). But it will have unintended effects as it will also
exclude documents about movies filmed entirely on location or entirely on a
sound stage. A better query would be...
(movie, film) AND (location, sound stage)
...requiring the word "movie" or the word "file" to be in the same document
as the word "location" or the phrase "sound stage".
Operators are case-insensitive: AND and and are equivalent.
Operators are enclosed by "pointy brackets". Thus, the AND operator is
strictly rendered as . However, three and only three operators are
exempt from the "pointy bracket" rule: AND, OR and NOT. These may be
bracketed--it is purely optional.
- AND finds documents containing both of the terms.
- OR finds documents containing either term (unless
one is an advanced
user, one may consider it equivalent to a comma).
- NOT finds documents which contain the first term, but
excludes documents
containing the second term. Computer laptop excludes documents
containing the word "laptop" and then returns documents containing the
word "computer".
- "" (quotation marks) enclosing a phrase or a word
returns exact matches. Note that this means quotation marks enclosing
a word suppresses stemming. Thus film finds documents containing "film",
"films", "filming", etc., but "film" returns only documents
containing "film".
- <NEAR> finds documents containing both terms in
proximity to one another. Thus, whereas "diver kills shark" finds
documents containing exactly that phrase, diver<NEAR>kills<NEAR>shark
also finds documents containing "shark kills diver".
- <NEAR/n> finds documents containing both terms
within n words of one another. Thus baseball<NEAR/10>yankee
finds documents with "Yankee" (or "Yankees") within ten words of "baseball".
- * (asterisk) is a wildcard representing one or
more characters. Wild* returns documents containing "wildcard",
"wilderness" and "[Gene] Wilder".
Verity® is a worldwide trademark of Verity,
Inc., registered in the United States and numerous other countries worldwide.
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