Some hints on query formulation

• All terms are equally weighted in the query.
• Lots of common words get removed from the query. You can use them, but they will be stripped out of the query. Examples are: "and", "not", "the", "am", "about", etc.
• This database has two extra FIELDS that you can query in addition to the main text. They are:
  • TITLE This field will let you specify terms that occur in the web page titles.
  • SOURCE The sources are the URLs of the web pages contained in this database. You can specify a host name or terms from the path portion of the URL.
• There are three ways you can add a FIELD query to your main query:
  1. ADD Will simply add the FIELD query to the rest of the query.
  2. REQUIRE Will force all returned documents to satisfy this FIELD query. For example, if you put "cool" in the TITLE query B and choose REQUIRE, all the documents that are returned to you will have the term "cool" in their title.
  3. REJECT Similar to REQUIRE, only returned documents must not satisfy the FIELD query.