Center for International Earth Science Information Network

User's Guide to Searching with the CIESIN Search Engine
R. Bourdeau

This document provides a brief introduction to the effective use of CIESIN's search engine. Basic features are described below. Advanced features are described here.

Basic Features

SIMPLE SEARCHES: WORDS AND PHRASES

The simplest kind of search expression is a word, or a phrase. A phrase is a sequence of one or more words. Only those documents that contain the exact word or phrase provided will be selected by the query.

Examples:

mortality

human

population

cause of death

population distribution

Note that, unlike most popular search engines, phrases are not treated as a list of words, but are instead interpreted as a fragment of a sentence. The exact phrase must occur in a document if the search engine is to find it.

BOOLEAN SEARCHES

Many users will already be familiar with the concept of using Boolean expressions in queries. You can use Boolean operators to combine results from simpler queries in powerful ways. There are three Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT.

When you write:

word1 AND word2

you are saying that you want to locate all documents that contain both word1 and word2. Documents that contain neither word1 nor word2 will not be selected.

For example, the search expression:

death AND cause

will select only those documents that contain both the word "death" and the word "cause".

When you write:

word1 OR word2

you are saying that you want to locate all documents that contain either word1 or word2, or both. Documents that contain neither word1 nor word2 will not be selected.

For example, the search expression:

death OR mortality

will select only those documents that contain either the word "death" or the word "mortality".

When you write:

word1 NOT word2

you are saying that you want to locate all documents that contain word1 but not word2. Documents that don't contain word1 will be ignored. Documents containing both word1 and word2 will be ignored.

For example, the search expression:

death NOT cause

will select only those documents that contain the word "death" but not the word "cause"

You can parenthesize Boolean expressions and combine them into ever more complicated queries.

For example:

(disease AND cause of death) NOT natural causes

would select only documents containing both the word "disease" and the phrase "cause of death", but not documents containing the phrase "natural causes".

This page last modified: May 07, 2002

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