Ranked Keywords: Help

What is a Ranked Keywords search?

Use this search to finds words and phases located anywhere in the catalog record. Use Ranked Keywords searches when it is not clear where words or phrases in catalog records are likely to fall, when words or phrases may appear in different places in different records, or when there are no results using other types of searches.

Because the ranked keyword search is set up to look for any of the words entered and because of the very large size of the Yale University database, ranked keyword search results can be very imprecise. The records display according to the system's evaluation of their relevance, but it is strongly recommended that special punctuation symbols be used to ensure more precise searching. 

Ranked Keywords Examples:

Search string . . .	Retrieves catalog records containing . . .
"history of financ?"	history of: finance, financing, financial, etc.
"rhythm and blues"	the exact phrase; the exact phrase would be different from the search "rhythm blues" or "rhythm & blues"
+sports !baseball	the word "sports" eliminating any that also include the word "baseball"
"human rights" !conferences	the exact phrase "human rights" eliminating any that also contain the word "conferences"

Search Tips:

• Enter words or phrases in any order.
• All words will be searched including "and", "or", "not", "the", "a", "la", "das", etc.
• Use quotation marks (" ") to retrieve exact phrases (e.g., "cold war")
• Use ? at the end of a search word for truncation (e.g., econom? will retrieve economic, economical, economists, economy, etc.). 
• Search results are ranked using a relevancy algorithm. To improve the relevancy of the results it is usually better to use more words or phrases in the search strategy in addition to using the suggested punctuation tools.

Ranked Keywords search results are displayed as a Ranked Keywords Title List in ranked order using a special relevancy algorithm. Although relatively new to library online catalogs, relevancy ranking is used by many Web search engines (e.g., AltaVista, Lycos, etc.) However, each formula for determining relevance is a little different. Here is some information on the ranking factors used in the Yale University Main Catalog:

• Uniqueness of search terms within the database
• Proximity of search terms to each other within the catalog record 
• Number of different search terms present in a catalog record
• Number of times a search word is present in catalog record fields (e.g., subject heading field, author field, title field) in which the terms occur.