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Tutorial: ABE new search facilities
This discusses new search features at the largest used/OP/rare
bookselling site: http://www.abebooks.com From: Jayson (head of systems) on the ABE discussion forum: With the new search engine in operation, some of the new features are available through the web site and more will be coming as we phase in the complete user interface for search. In the meantime, so that you can take advantage of new search features, here are some of the concepts supported by search on AbeBooks. Full Text Search The KEYWORD field is now searches title, author, publisher, ISBN, subject and the FULL TEXT of the description. Previously full text searches were not available. Wants matching will be updated early next week to support this as well. Advanced Boolean Searches Advanced search now sports a new option to turn on boolean searching, which you have to do if you use the old style boolean search (~ means NOT) or the new boolean searches that use AND, OR and NOT keywords to indicate comparisons between different search terms. There is also a new help page for boolean searches that gives you the basics, but here are a few of the concepts in more detail... BOOLEAN SEARCH OPTION A new option on the advanced search pages allows you to turn boolean search on or off. If you use AND, OR and NOT within a normal search, they are just ignored unless they are within double quotes in which case they are treated like any other more significant word. Turning on boolean search adds meaning to these words and uses them to compare different parts of the search term as described in the boolean search help and in this tutorial. TOP LEVEL NEGATION A fancy word for saying that you cannot use a search term that only consists of something that doesn't exist. For example, doing a search with only the author field and that field containing "not King" will not work. Searching for "stephen not king" on the otherhand would work. You always need a positive term that will find something before you can use a negative term to subtract something else. In many cases you can get away with using top level negation in a field as long as you have at least one other text field containing something that is not a top level negation. For example, searching for Author "not king" while also searching for Title "christine" would work in boolean mode. PARENTHESIS These handy pieces of punctuation help you to group your boolean searches so that you can do more complex queries. For example, searching in the title field for "new flower not (york or jersey)" will return all occurances of the two words "new" and "flower" within the title field but not if they contain either "york" or "jersey." The parenthesis are important so that the search engine knows what you are talking about and in what order to do the comparisons. It is similar to math, where the expression 5+8*2 is not as clear as 5+(8*2) especially if you really meant (5+8)*2. The search engine is smart enough to figure out that "new flower not new york" means "(new flower) not (new york)" but if you want to be safe, then group your words together to indicate your meaning. Phrase Searches If you want to search for a phrase of text, rather than individual words, you can place them within double quotes to perform that match. So searching on the two words, "big" and "lake" (excluding the quotes) would return 162 results all containing those two words in any order, and the phrase quoted "big lake" (including the quotes) would return 15 more accurate results with the words appearing exactly in that order. Picking Your Search Terms We see many searches where searchers are using the entire book title including punctuation and every word in the search. It is quicker and will most likely return better results if you instead search for the main significant words in the term. The small conjunctions and small words like "if, is, an, ..." are ignored anyway if not placed in quotes. Also, if you pick a term like "mountain" the search engine would match that against "mountains" as well, but the opposite is not true and "mountains" will miss the shorter non-plural version of "mountain". Like the old search help says, less is usually better. I agree, as long as the "less" contains the significant terms that identify what you are looking for and filter out those that you are not. Advanced Use of the Keyword Field The keyword field has a few hidden features that are not commonly used and are somewhat experimental, but highly useful. One of those is called "restrict operators." Since this field can search any of the other text fields, you can do complex boolean queries all in one field and get the search engine to do more of what you want it to do. Restrict operators limit the search to look at only one field rather than the entire list that keyword normally can scan (title, author, publisher, subject, isbn, and full text). So in the keyword field I could say... text:reprint to search for the word "reprint" in only the book description. (which also will find "re-print" by the way). The full list of restrict operators is: * title * author * publisher * subject * isbn * text and a shorter version for most of these as * tn (title) * an (author) * pn (publisher) * sn (subject) To use a restrict operator, just place a colon after it and then the term you want to search. If you have more than one term to use with that operator, you can either use a restrict operator before each term, or put the list of terms in parenthesis. For example, looking for Stephen King I could do either of the following: * author:stephen author:king * an:stephen an:king * anstephen king) * authorstephen king) You can also place full boolean expressions inside the parenthesis as well and also between restrict operators. Here are a few other examples... Search for all Stephen King books that do not have exlib or bce in any field, the following would go into the keyword field: anstephen king) not (exlib or bce) Oops, want to get rid of those with edge wear, change that to: anstephen king) not (exlib or bce) not text"edge wear" or edgewear) Note that the use of the keyword field and restrict operators is the only way to explicitly search the subject field. For example: anstephen king) sn:horror And for a more complex answer, and homework, determine what this last query does and have fun creating your own in the future... In the keyword field, us: anstephen king) pn:1983 sn:horror not tn:christine not text:wear By the way, if you want to skip prefix operators for most of this query, and do the same query, you could do the following: Author field: stephen king Title field: not christine Publisher field: 1983 Keyword field: sn:horror not text:wear Have fun searching! And please share query ideas on the forums for others to use. -- Jayson Minard VP Systems Abebooks |
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