Relevancy Searching

Increasingly, electronic search software provides some form of relevancy searching or relevancy ranking.  This method of processing a search statement is very common with web search engines such as AltaVista and HotBot.

Relevancy searching allows you to enter any number of search terms to describe your topic.  The software then looks for the occurrences of each of the terms you entered (though sometimes ignoring less important words like "the" and "of").   Any item which matches at least one of the terms is retrieved.  The results are presented to you in a ranked manner according to their perceived relevance to your request.

Results which are listed at the beginning of the retrieval list are considered more relevant than other items because these types of conditions have been met:

• all or most of the search terms are present

• the search terms appear in the title or abstract for the items

• the search terms appear in the first paragraph or so of the documents' text.

Because relevancy searching will retrieve items that match only some of the terms, and these terms may occur in unimportant places in the texts of the retrieved items, this method will give results when a Boolean search would not.  However, many of the results can appear to be fairly irrelevant to the searcher.  Thus, if you know that you are searching a database that uses relevancy searching and ranking, it is best to enter several terms rather than just one or two; the more descriptive you make your search, the fewer irrelevant results you will retrieve.

Read about Boolean searching