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We would like to find out which "Writing About History" seminars are
being offered this fall and when they will meet.
We'll use proximity as a way to eliminate some of the irrelevant documents. Select
'sentence' from the Proximity drop-down list.
Enter query history . Time the interval required to return results.
How many hits were returned?
Very Well
Well
Fair
Poor
Very Poor
The first search may have produced too many hits to be useful. Let's
refine the query. Keep proximity set to 'sentence'.
Enter query writing history .
How many hits were returned?
Our last search found all documents that included either term or both
terms. Let's restrict it to require that both terms be present.
Enter query +writing +history .
How many hits were returned?
You suspect that the right documents might be found in the registrar
directories on the main Penn server. Let's concentrate on those directories.
(This free trial version of Webinator does not offer URL searching. The production
version does.)
Enter query writing AND history AND url:www.upenn.edu/registrar .
How many hits were returned?
Let's tighten the proximity to focus the search further. Select '1 word' from the Proximity
drop-down list.
Enter query +writing +history .
How many hits were returned?
As an alternative approach, let's try defining the course title as
a phrase. This will ensure that the words are required to be immediately
adjacent to one another and in the specified order. Select 'page' for proximity.
Enter query "writing about history" .
How many hits were returned?
We are now going to look for information about modems. We'll start with
a natural language query.
Enter query What modems should I use to connect to PennNet?
How many hits were returned?
Very Well
Well
Fair
Poor
Very Poor
Let's narrow our search by looking for a specific model of modem. Set proximity to 'page'.
Enter query "U.S. Robotics" .
How many hits were returned?
Now we'll employ "fuzzy pattern" matching (invoked with a % operator) to ensure we
find variant terms such as "US Robotics," "U.S.Robotics," "U.S. Robottics," etc.
Select 'most' from the Word Forms drop-down list (invoking "morpheme processing", a
feature that includes stems and other variant forms)
Enter query %US Robot .
How many hits were returned?
Let's see if we can find out if the U.S. Robotics Sportster modem supports
speeds high enough to use the high-speed modem pool. We will use a numeric
search, invoked by the # operator.
Enter query +"U.S. Robotics" +#>14.4 .
How many hits were returned?
To direct that the numerical value we specified be applied only to
modem speed, let's combine terms for the value and unit of speed.
We'll use thesaurus mode, invoked by the ~ operator, to capture variations on the concept of baud,
such as kb/s, kbps, etc.
Enter query +"U.S. Robotics" +#>14.4 ~baud .
How many hits were returned?
Let's make sure the hits returned represent current information. We'll
do this by adding a regular expression for recent years to our query.
Enter query +"U.S. Robotics" +#>14.4 ~baud /199[67] .
How many hits were returned?
Let's search on a broad concept. Select 'rank' from the Proximity drop-down list.
Select 'exact' from the Word Forms list.
Enter query undergraduate research .
How many hits were returned?
Very Well
Well
Fair
Poor
Very Poor
Observe whether the results report shows you any of the document context
for each hit and whether the document URL is made explicit (for printing
or saving). Click on the the magnifier icon to see additional context.
[Note: Webinator testers using older versions of Netscape may encounter
problems showing the context of search results involving internal or self-referring
documents. This is a known bug in Netscape.]
Is the context information helpful?
We'd now like to browse to see if there are other documents that refer
to the ones we've been given as search results. Click on the <- icon next to
the first hit on your list to invoke a link reference report.
Do you find this a useful way to expand your search?
An alternative way to explore this topic is to surf documents similar
to those returned by your intial search. Go to the tenth hit on your
list and click on the = icon to find similar documents. Note whether the
original list is reordered after you invoke this document similarity search.
Do you find this a useful way to expand your search?
