How to Use SC Web Seek

Boolean Expressions

Boolean expression can be used in SC Seek to refine a search. Select the boolean from the match categories. These expressions are used to describe exactly what you are searching. Normally, boolean expressions use the terms "and" and "or" but parenthesis can also be used to group things together. Here are some examples of boolean expressions as they relate to SC Web Seek:

state and government
state or government
(state or government) and agency

Restrict and Exclude

These values are a pattern that all URLs of the search results will have to match or exclude. The resrtict command can be used to limit the search to a particular keyword, subtree, or subsection. For example, restricting the search by using "springdale", will result in only URLs with Springdale in the address. The exclude command can be used to exclude certain keywords in a url. For example, excluding lpitr will eliminate all results from LPITR. To restrict or exclude multiple items, separate each with the "|". This is the symbol located above the "\".

Adding URLs

Please click here to add your url to SC Web Seek.

SC Web Seek Searching Methods

Every document is parsed into individual words. Each word has a context that is defined by the surrounding HTML. For example, words that are within a h1 tag have a different context as words in the document title. Each context has a weight associated with it so that some contexts are more important than others. In addition to the context of a word, the location of the word within the document is used to assign significance to the word; words that appear at the beginning of a document are given more importance than words at the end. Lastly, the number of times a word occurs within the same document is also noted. All these things combined will give a particular word in a document a combined weight that is stored in the word database.

SC Web Seek:
The task of SC Web Seek is to find documents that are relevant to the search query. Although the actual algorithm is fairly complicated because of the boolean expressions parsing and fuzzy searching, the algorithm basically goes something like this: Each of the words is looked up and a list of documents that the occur in is generated. Each document is now assigned a weight that is computed from the combined weight of all the words that got it into the result list. Once all documents have been identified, they are now sorted by weight. The document with the highest weight is assigned the maximum number of stars and the number of stars for all other documents is scaled down from there.

Meta Tags in SC Web Seek

As the SC Web Seek system indexes HTML pages on a system, individual authors of pages may want to control some of the aspects of the indexing operation. To this end SC Web Seek recognizes some special meta tag attributes. The following can be controlled in this manner:

Do not index the document

Set keywords for the document