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Boolean search: A search allowing the inclusion or
exclusion of documents containing certain words through the use of
operators such as AND, NOT and OR.
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Concept search: A search for documents related
conceptually to a word, rather than specifically containing the word
itself.
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Full-text index: An index containing every word of
every document cataloged, including stop words (defined below).
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Fuzzy search: A search that will find matches even
when words are only partially spelled or misspelled.
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Index: The searchable catalog of documents created by
search engine software. Also called "catalog." Index is
often used as a synonym for search engine. Index is commonly
pluralized as "indices." However, Search Engine Watch
instead uses the alternative plural form "indexes."
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Keyword search: A search for documents containing one
or more words that are specified by a user.
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Phrase search: A search for documents containing a
exact sentence or phrase specified by a user.
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Precision: The degree in which a search engine lists
documents matching a query. The more matching documents that are
listed, the higher the precision. For example, if a search engine
lists 80 documents found to match a query but only 20 of them contain
the search words, then the precision would be 25%.
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Proximity search: A search where users to specify that
documents returned should have the words near each other.
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Query-By-Example: A search where a user instructs an
engine to find more documents that are similar to a particular
document. Also called "find similar."
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Recall: Related to precision, this is the degree in
which a search engine returns all the matching documents in a
collection. There may be 100 matching documents, but a search engine
may only find 80 of them. It would then list these 80 and have a
recall of 80%.
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Relevancy: How well a document provides the
information a user is looking for, as measured by the user.
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Search Engine: The software that searches an index and
returns matches. Search engine is often used synonymously with spider
and index, although these are separate components that work with the
engine.
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Spider: The software that scans documents and adds
them to an index by following links. Spider is often used as a synonym
for search engine.
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Stemming: The ability for a search to include the
"stem" of words. For example, stemming allows a user to
enter "swimming" and get back results also for the stem word
"swim."
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Stop words: Conjunctions, prepositions and articles
and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear often in documents
yet alone may contain little meaning.
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Thesaurus: A list of synonyms a search engine can use
to find matches for particular words if the words themselves don't
appear in documents.
