The news search engine differs from the current side-wide search engine in two main aspects. Firstly, it performs relevance ranking on the results, and displays highest ranking matches on top. Secondly, it supports a number of new query options to allow better pruning of search results, thereby helping you to locate the desired information faster.

News Search - How does it work?

Relevancy is determined by the following factors:

• Implicit AND and OR scoring: Documents matching more keywords are considered relevant than those matching less.
• Document Type Weighting: Matched words found in the Title section of a news article are considered more relevant than those found in its Body.
• Date of the News Article Recent news articles are considered more relevant the older articles
• Freqency of Keyword(s) Articles containing multiple occurences of keyword(s) are considered more relevant that article in which the keyword(s) occurs only once.

Search Query Syntax Options

Query sytax options provide the same query specification expressiveness found in most of the Web-based search engines, such as: wild-card search, phrase search, required and prohibited words, title and document-type search, etc. The syntax for using these options is described below.

" " Phrase Search

A phrase is any string of adjacent words surrounded by quotes. All searches will be case-insensitive to provide the most coverage. For example "united nations" will find only news articles that contain an exact united nations match

* Right-hand wildcard matching

Placing an * after a word or prefix will match words that begin with that word or prefix. For example, cap* will find all matches containing cap, caps, capital, etc. Since the searches are also case-insensitive, it will also find Capital, CAPITAL, etc.

+ - Required and Prohibited Words

By placing a + or - in front of a word or phrase, you require or prohibit a word being in the document of a search result. For example, +Michigan +University -East finds documents containing Michigan and University, but not containing East.

[T] Title Only

Placing a [T] in front of a word will restrict search results to those article that contain the keyword(s) in the title of the article. For example, [T]Venice, will return article matches which have Venice in the article's Title. Enclose one of more of these letters in brackets before the word. This search can be used in conjunction with "+" and "-" (the "+/-" goes first).