Search recommendations

Note: These recommendations apply to non-boolean searches. If you wish to perform a boolean search, please click here for instructions.

Alternate sort methods explained
Some users are confused by the sort option on the Advanced Search page. Normally, our search engine will return its results sorted by relevance. The keywords you enter are used to "score" each Research Note, and the documents that score the highest are returned first.

If you select an alternate sort method, such as by date, your keywords become a filter. Thus, instead of returning relevant documents, the search engine will return matching documents. This distinction is important, because documents that seem to be off-topic may appear at the top of the result set if they match your search terms and were published recently. Please use the alternate sort methods only if you have specific content in mind that you are searching for.

I have too many results, or they aren't relevant!
Avoid common words
Words commonly found in all of our documents, such as "the" and "executive" will turn up too many matches. Being as specific as you can when specifying search terms will help our search engine find the most relevant results.

Avoid using very short, common words
The word 'of' is also the beginning of many words commonly found in our documents, such as 'office' and 'offering'. Thus, because our search engine uses wildcards at the ends of words, using very short and common words may produce result lists that are too long to view.

Use more search terms to refine a search
Search terms are automatically combined to create a search result. The specific algorithm is not an AND search. Rather, the presence of each search term in the title, abstract, believes statement, and document body, combined with the article's date, determines the "score" of each document. If you are having problems finding documents relevant to your subject matter (especially when searching on commonly-used company names), try including more specific search terms (such as those related to technologies). This will help improve the score of documents matching your criteria.

I have too few results!
Avoid punctuation
Our indexing engine automatically removes punctuation from words stored in its index, so you should not need to include them in your criteria.

Don't be TOO specific
If your search terms are too specific, you may not find the answers you need at all. If your search doesn't turn up enough results, try removing search terms one at a time until the result list is large enough to suit your needs.

Use the shortest version of each word
Our search engine automatically places a wildcard after each search word. This means a search for "willing" will also match "willingness". If there are multiple forms of the word you are using, use the shortest form. (For example, always use "deploy" rather than "deployment" or "deploying".)