• How does search engine work?
• Search fields
• Accents and special characters
• Search options
• Search results

How Does the Search Engine Work?

Panoptic processes a query consisting of one or more words or a phrase (specific series of words), and tries to find pages containing all of the words. However, Panoptic will also find "partially matching" pages, which contain only some of the words in the query.

Advanced Search Fields

• Anywhere: searches keywords anywhere on the page (including metadata fields)
• Title: searches for words contained only within the title of the page.
• Subject: searches for specific words describing topic of the page. Most terms come from the Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus.
• Language: searches English and French pages; English pages only; or French pages only.
• Condensed results: displays search results with or without page summaries.
• Select the NRC Web site(s) you would like to search: NRC has over 30 major sites. You can narrow your search by selecting one or more sites by holding the CTRL key as you click on your mouse.

Accents and Special Characters

When searching for words containing accents and special characters, only results containing the accents and special characters will be returned. If the user enters a query without accents and special characters, the search engine will retrieve results matching both accent and special and non-accent and special words.

For example, a search for "Claude Massé" would not return pages with "Claude Masse", but a search for "Claude Masse" would return pages with "Claude Massé".

Search Options

Phrase search
Example: "computer programming"
Enclose searches for specific phrases in quotation marks. Only results matching all of the words enclosed in quotes will be considered a match. For example, a search for "computer programming" will find only pages containing the exact string computer programming.

Truncation
Example 1: technolog*
Example 2: *technolog*
Truncation consists of entering a part of a word followed immediately by an asterisk (*) that represents any number of letters, up to a full word. For example, the query technolog* would match all words starting with technolog such as technology, technologies, etc., whereas the query *technolog* would match all these words and more, such as biotechnology. The truncation operator works both at the end and at the beginning of words, but not in the middle.

Mandatory exclusion operator
Example: database -design
Search results of high relevance will include the word database but not the word design. Note that search results of less relevance will satisfy the mandatory constraint (no occurrences of design) but may not contain database. (This is similar to the NOT Boolean operator).

Mandatory inclusion operator
Example: electric +engineering
Search results of high relevance will include the words electric and engineering. Every result will contain the word engineering.

Dysjunction operator
Example: [nuclear atomic] reactor
Search results will include the word reactor and at least of the terms in brackets, either nuclear or atomic or both. The square brackets achieve a similar effect to the OR Boolean operator.

Search Results

Search results are divided into fully matching and partially matching pages, ranked by relevance. The title of the page is provided with a link to the page. You may also choose to include a summary of the article, with the search term highlighted for searches in the Anywhere field. Although the summary may give an idea of the page's contents, it will not necessarily display the most relevant part of the document.