About this Search

Words Anywhere will search for all terms entered in the search box, no matter what order the terms are entered and no matter where the terms appear in a MadCat record. Results are sorted by relevance. Limits may be applied to this search.

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How to Search

When entering search terms:

• you may include initial articles such as a, an, the, le, etc.
• use quotation marks around exact phrases.
• use truncation (the ? symbol) for variant endings, if you are unsure of spelling, or if you do not wish to type the entire word.

To find:

• the DVD A Beautiful Mind, type: a beautiful mind dvd
• the Norton Critical Edition of Gulliver's Travels, type: gullivers travels norton
• the book Random Matrices by Madan Lal Mehta, type: random matrices mehta
• all records that include the exact phrase racial profiling anywhere in the record, type: "racial profiling"
• the videorecording (DVD or VHS) Citizen Kane, type: citizen kane video?

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How to Interpret Results

Bars

A record that is considered most relevant will be assigned five bars. A record considered least relevant will be assigned one bar.

There is no specific order to the records that receive the same number of bars.

 

Algorithm

The rank order of results is determined by a relevancy algorithm. The factors that make a search result rise in the ranking are:

• location of search terms in specific areas of the record. For example, records with terms appearing in the title will be considered more relevant than those with terms appearing in a series title or subject heading
• proximity of search terms to each other within the record

For searches with two or more words:

• keywords that appear closer together in a record are considered more relevant
• the relevance algorithm does not take into account the number of occurrences of a search term in a record

 

Re-sorting Results

If you wish, use the dropdown menu above the list of results to re-sort results by date (oldest or newest first). Title and author re-sorting is also available but unpredictable.

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