[ Feedback | Main Menu | Add URL ]

[ Actors & Actresses | Directors | Movies | Music | News | Current Previews | Future Previews | Television ]

[ Boolean & Proximity Operators | Wildcards | Free-Text Queries | Vector Space Queries ]

To search for any word or phrase in Star Seeker, type it into the query box and click on the "Search" button to execute the query. This will produce a list of files that contain the word or phrase no matter where it appears.

• Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.

• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can use uppercase or lowercase.

• You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.

• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for "War and Peace", the results could give you "War and Peace" and "War for Peace" because and is a noise word and appears in the exception list.

• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.

• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“).

• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, “The Empire Stikes Back or ““Empire””” searches for The Empire Strikes Back or “Empire”.

• Use the Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) and the proximity operator (NEAR) to specify additional search information.

• Use the wildcard character (*) to match words with a given prefix. For example, the query act* matches the terms “ACT,” “actress,” and so forth.

• Free-text queries and vector space queries can also be used.

Use Star Seeker's boolean and proximity operators to create a more precise query.

Star Seeker Tips:

• You can add parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query.

• Use double quotes (“) to indicate that a Boolean or NEAR operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, “Mork and Mindy” will match pages with the phrase, not pages that match the Boolean expression. In addition to being an operator, the word and is a noise word in English.

• The NEAR operator is similar to the AND operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being searched for are in the same page. However, the NEAR operator differs from AND because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of words. That is, the rank of a page with the searched-for words closer together is greater than or equal to the rank of a page where the words are farther apart. If the searched-for words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the page is assigned a rank of zero.

• The NOT operator can be used only after an AND operator in content queries; it can be used only to exclude pages that match a previous content restriction. For property value queries, the NOT operator can be used apart from the AND operator.

• The AND operator has a higher precedence than OR. For example, the first three queries are equal, but the fourth is not:

  tom AND dick OR harry
  harry OR tom AND dick
  harry OR (tom AND dick)
  (harry OR tom) AND dick

Wildcard operators help you find pages containing words similar to a given word.

Star Seeker finds pages that best match the words and phrases in a free-text query. This is done by automatically finding pages that match the meaning, not the exact wording, of the query. Boolean, proximity, and wildcard operators are ignored within a free-text query. Free-text queries are prefixed with $contents. Please note that free-text searches can be inefficient and may produce unpredictable results. Try using other methods first.

Star Seeker supports vector space queries. Vector queries return pages that match a list of words and phrases. The rank of each page indicates how well the page matched the query.

• Components in vector queries are separated by commas.
• Components in vector queries can be weighted by using the [weight] syntax.
• Pages returned by vector queries do not necessarily match every term in the query.