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 June 13, 1997
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Frequently Asked Questions about Searching Macworld OnlineThis document contains: Search capabilities on the Web are still evolving. Stay tuned as Macworld Online continues to fine tune the available options. Meanwhile, here are some hints that will help you to find exactly what you need.What exactly is being searched?There are two search features here at Macworld's web site. The first search option encompasses one year's worth of Macworld's articles. This includes features, reviews, columns, new product announcements, and news stories. Be aware that sections of the magazine such as Star Ratings, which are themselves indices of articles from the past year, are searched only in their most recent iterations. The second search option searches the titles and descriptions of every file in the software library. The software library consists mostly of shareware and freeware applications for the Macintosh. In addition there are demos of commercial software products, software bug fixes, and freely distributed updates to commercial software.How do I optimize my searches?One of the most frustrating moments when using a search feature is when too many references are returned from a search query. In some cases the articles found may contain only a passing reference to your search word or phrase. The following explanation offers a few tips on how to limit or avoid this problem.The article search works by examining each Macworld article in an archive the past year to see whether it contains the word or words that you specify in the entry box on the Search page. Similarly, the software search works by examining the title and file description of each item in the software library. Typing more than one target word in the entry box allows the search engine to find documents that are more specific. Don't be afraid to be creative. For instance, if you are looking for buying advice on fax modems, typing simple "fax modem" in the entry box will return a large number of entries, many of which may be inappropriate. However, if you enter "fax modem cost buy purchase recommend" the articles returned will all include these terms and should be more likely to offer buying advice. If you were interested in an article that explained fax modems, you might enter "fax modems protocols standards." This will skew your search results towards articles that have a more technological focus. As a general rule, you want to enter more information into the search box, not less. You can even take this to an extreme: If you all ready have one document and would like to find similar or related documents, you can enter an entire paragraph as the search phrase. The search engine will look for similar documents with similar content. Also, don't forget to look at the various types of indices Macworld creates on an ongoing basis. Star Ratings, which is an abstracted index to all of the reviews, is updated monthly. Finally, there is a full index published in our software library every six months (you'll find it in the mentioned in Macworld folder).
The search results have been organized to facilitate finding the appropriate article or articles. After every successful search you actually get several lists of articles. Each list corresponds to a type of article found in Macworld. The search engine groups all the reviews into one list, the feature articles into another, and the news stories into a third. Each of these lists are returned one after the other on the same page, so be sure to scroll down to see each list. The articles are also ranked and sorted according to relevance. Be sure to read the next section to understand that process. The software library search returns results by simply listing the files that contain the search word or phrase, also ranked by relevance as explained below.
The search engine looks for documents that contain the word or words that you entered as a search string. After it has identified the documents that contain those words, it gives the articles a relevance ranking. The search engine calculates the ratio of the number of times the word or words occur in proportion to the size of the document. This calculation is then translated into a number from 1 to 1000 that appears to the left of the article. This enables you to quickly gather the relative importance of the documents listed. By reading the lists you can identify which section of the magazine the article originally appeared, as well as its relative score based on the above weighting criteria.
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