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CERN Search Syntax Summary

Dariusz Kogut IT/WO

A new online help page has been prepared for the InfoSeek Search Engine (see the article "Search Engine News" in this CNL). This page,


http://wwwsearch.cern.ch:8765/help/

is based on CERN Intranet examples and has improved help for syntax issues.

InfoSeek will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. The syntax of this Search Engine is summarized in the following table.

Operator

Action and examples

"term1 term2 .."

Specifies that words should be adjacent.
"scientific committees" returns all pages containing those words next to each other.

+term

Requires a term.
+microcosm +exhibition returns all pages with both microcosm and exhibition, but not necessarily next to each other.

term1 AND term2

Requires both terms : term1 and term2.
Works in the same way as (+term1 +term2)
"Desktop Forum" AND minutes returns all pages containing phrase Desktop Forum and word minutes.

-term

Excludes documents containing a term.
"Housing Service" -hostel returns all pages about Housing Service excluding these ones containing hostel.

term1 OR term2

Tries to find term1 or term2.
+"Web Office" +(apache OR analog) returns all pages containing Web Office and either apache or analog.

term1 term2 ...

Terms in lowercase will match words in any case.
+lep +title:map returns all pages with lep, LEP, Lep ... and with title containing map, MAP or Map.

fieldname:term

Searching for special types of information:

link:	Finds pages that contain at least one link to the specified page or Web site. link:www.cerncourier.com
site:	Finds pages on the specified Web site. +site:www.cern.ch +ski -snowboard
url:	Finds pages with the specified word anywhere in the page's URL. +"particle accelerator" +url:lep
title:	Finds pages with the specified phrase in the title portion of the document. cern AND holidays +title:official
likes:	Finds pages with an HTML metatag with name likes and with content containing the given phrase.
doctype:pdf doctype:ps doctype:html	Finds documents that are in pdf format, ps format or html format. NA49 AND doctype:pdf

For matters related to this article please contact the author.

Cnl.Editor@cern.ch

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CERN Search Syntax Summary