The Neoseeker engine is designed similarly to standard site search engines such as Yahoo or Alta Vista. By default the engine will look for all words that you enter into the keywork field. If a record contains one word but not the others, the record is NOT returned. If you want to find records that contain any of the keywords that you enter, simply use boolean style expressions to indicate which words are optional.

Anchoring Words

The engine does not descriminate where a keyword is found in a word. This means that a search for "start" will return records with "starting", "restart", "upstart" etc. To anchor your keyword, simply use "^" on whichever side you want to anchor.

^start will only look for words that begin with "start".

start^ will only look for words that end with "start".

^start^ will look for the exact word "start".

Grouping words

All keywords submitted to the engine are treated as individual words to be matched. Sometimes it is desirable to group words into a phrase. To group words together, enclose them in quotations marks. For example, "video card" will look for those two words as a phrase - without the quotes any record containing those two words in any order, anywhere in the record, will be returned.

first person - would find the sentence: "I was first, this person was last".

"first person" - would only find a sentence like: "I was the first person".

Boolean Support

The Neoseeker engine allows boolean style searching. You can use the reserved words "and", "or", "not" or the symbols "+", "-" to denote words that are required, optional, or that must not exist in a record.

lcd or crt monitor - will find records with the word "monitor" and either "lcd" or "crt".

lcd or crt not monitor - will find records that contain either "lcd" or "crt" as long as they don't also contain "monitor".

Case Sensitivity

By default all searches are case insensitive. However, when you enter a search query which contains any capital letters, case sensitive matching is automatically enabled. This means that a search for "oni" will return a far different result than a search for "Oni". It is recommended that you first try a case insensitive match before applying a case sensitive one.