Nova Search Interface - Online Help

The following image shows a typical opening screen for the search interface that comes packaged with the Nova system. Some of the characteristics may be different than the interface that you are using, but the operation of the interface is the same.

Searching

Search Options

There are several options available to you when searching. The main ones are:

The number of hits to search for. You can select 20, 50, or 100 hits. Note that the more hits you select, the longer it will take to complete the search.
The collection to search. The collections available are displayed to the right of the hits selection. You can choose from any of the collections displayed, or any combination of the Collections displayed. Collections that will be searched for this query are checked.
The type of sorting to perform on the results. You may choose to sort the results by score alone, or you may choose to sort them by the collection in which they occur and then by score within each collection.

Search terms

You can enter the words or phrases that you want to search for into the search box. When entering terms, try to use the root forms of words. For example, search for loop instead of loops or process instead of processing. Given the root form of a word, the query server will retrieve documents with the other forms, but the opposite will not happen!

Once you've entered your search phrases you can press the search button to start the search.

The hit display

When you run a search, the resulting hits are displayed in an easy to understand format, shown above. The hits are displayed in the order of their score. After the hit number, the score is displayed in boldface. The score, which is out of 100, tells you how relevant the given document is to your query. Scores below 90 are given to documents that do not contain all of your query terms.

Next to the score are the terms from the text that matched the terms from your query. Terms that are displayed as hypertext links lead to the concept browser for that term. The next line down contains the title of the document, which links you directly to the document.

After the title, you are shown the portion of the document that resulted in this document being selected as a query result. The passage containing the query terms is highlighted in red. By reading this passage you can determine whether this document is really relevant to your query. You may even be able to determine the answer to your question!

The concept browser

When you click on one of the terms displayed next to the hit score, you enter the concept browser centered on that concept. The concept browser gives you an hourglass view of that concept. It shows you all of the concepts that this concept is a kind of, and all of the concepts that are a kind of this concept.

Here, we see a concept browser centered on the concept accept mail. You can easily see that accept mail is a kind of receive mail, which is in turn a kind of mail, etc. You can also see that accepting mail is a kind of accept mail. The numbers displayed in parentheses beside each concept show you the number of documents in which the term appears.

In fact, the concept browser will initially only show you concepts 3 levels up or down in the concept taxonomy. If you click on the centered concept again, the concept browser will show you concepts one level deeper than it is already showing you.

If you click on one of the other concepts, the concept browser is recentered on that concept, at a depth of 3. Here' we've clicked on receive mail.

If you click on the Show Instances link to the right of the centered concept, you will be taken to a search results page that is generated by passing the concept as a query to the search engine.

Retrieved documents

When you click on a document title on the results page, the document is retrieved and displayed for you. At the top of the page, you will see a link called Jump to hit. This link will take you directly to the point in the document where the hit occurred.

You will also note that the hit is highlighted in the document, just as it was in the passage shown in the results list.