Search Tips

The IndexMySite search uses free-form full-text technology, yet it also understands Boolean syntax as well, for more experienced searchers.
Operator Usage Comments
SPACE apple banana Read as 'apple AND banana'.
AND apple AND banana Upper case is operator, Lower case is ignored
& apple & banana The & character is read as 'AND'
OR apple OR banana Upper case is operator, Lower case is ignored
| apple | banana The | character is read as 'OR'
NOT apple AND NOT banana Upper case is operator, Lower case is ignored
~ apple & ~ banana '& ~' is read as 'AND NOT'
XOR apple XOR banana XOR is read as 'exclusive or'
^ apple ^ banana The ^ character is read as XOR
[..] [apple banana orange] MOST of these

Example searches

You can type a question as you would pose the question verbally.
How do I prepare my taxes
[ Common words (how, do, I, and my) are ignored. The resultant query would be 'prepare AND taxes' ]

Or you could just type in a keyword query.
apple banana
[ The resultant query would be 'apple AND banana'
(AND is the default operator) ]

Or, you could type in a Boolean query.
apple OR ( banana AND NOT jello XOR [ spam ham chicken ] )
[ The IndexMySite engine recognizes AND, OR, NOT, XOR and nested parenthesis ]

We also have a shorthand Boolean syntax.
apple | ( banana & ~ jello ^ [ spam ham chicken ] ) )
[ This means the same as the preceding query ]

Our MOST OF operator finds documents with most of the terms you list within brackets.
[apple dumpling pie ice cream dessert]
[ Finds documents with more than 60% of these words ]

Partial Matching (Wildcards)

Indexmysite supports partial matching using wildcards *. ?. #, and +.

Operator Matches Comment
* one or more of any character lead* matches lead, leader, leadership
? one alpha character (a-z) lea?er matches leader, leaker, leaver
# one digit (0-9) A1#3 matches A123, A153, A193, etc.
+ one or more   ?+ or #+ z?+m matches zom, zoom, zaaam, etc.

ANY, ALL, MOST

If the query does not contain expressed Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc) then Indexmysite supplies them automatically. The user may direct Indexmysite to use one of the following operators:
Selection Result Example
ANY Uses the OR Boolean Operator apple banana becomes apple OR banana
ALL Uses the AND Boolean Operator apple banana becomes apple AND banana
MOST Matches at least 60% of [query terms]. 4 or less terms defaults to AND

Stemming

IndexMySite uses the root stems of search terms. For example, if you seach for 'preparation', IndexMySite actually searches for 'prepar' and will find occurances of: prepare, prepares, prepared, preparing, and preparation.

Case, punctuation and other things

IndexMySite ignores CASE. So searching for Cherries, cherries, or CHERRIES, would all give the same results.
Punctuation characters are ignored, as are extraneous whitespace characters.

Ranking (Sort order)

IndexMySite uses a number of criteria to determine ranking. If the search term is an 'Important' word in the document, the document will appear higher in the list. Importance is determined by the following:
  • word frequency
    If the search term is used in the document frequently.
  • word CASE
    If the word is capitalized in the document
  • word in Title
    If the word appears in the document Title
  • emphasized word
    If the word is bolded, in a heading, with a larger font, etc.

Sort by date

If the documents in the index contain date information, this option will order the documents by date - the newest document listed first. Date information is extracted from the document header information (TITLE, META DESCRIPTION, or META DC.Date). If two documents have the same date, the more relevant document is listed first.

Reverse Sort

Indexmysite is one of the only search engines which lets you sort in reverse order.  This would be helpful if you are looking for the oldest document instead of the newest.  Or perhaps you want to see which documents most people overlook with traditional sort order search engines. NOTE: The indexmysite search engine returns the best 200 documents.  In reverse sort mode, the bottom, or worst matching 200 documents are returned.  For example, if the query matches 4000 documents, in normal mode, documents 1 through 200 are returned.  In reverse sort mode, the bottom 200 (4000 through 3980) are returned.