The InfoReS search engine receives a user's question, searches its database for documents relevant to the question, and returns a list of documents back to the user.

A question is an expression containing a combination of key words and boolean terms (operators). Each word in a question is interpreted as right-truncated (wildcard). Search is case-insensitive. All keywords are highlighted in found relevant documents.

Search Queries

The boolean operators, AND, OR, NOT, and ADJ aid in establishing logical relationships between concepts expressed in natural language. These operators are especially useful in narrowing down the search.

• The AND operator is helpful in restricting a search when a particular pair of terms is known. For instance, when searching for documents on the e-mail protocols, a question such as "ambassad and russia and presid" would return only those documents that contain all the words "ambassador", "Russia" and "president".
• The OR operator is often used to join two different phrases of a Boolean search. A question such as "village OR country" would search for all documents containing either the word "village", or the word "country", or both.
• The NOT operator is used to reject any documents that contain certain words. The question "minister NOT prime" would find all documents containing the word "minister", that also do not contain the word "prime".
• The adjacent operator, ADJ, is used to ensure that one word is followed by another in the returned document, with no other words in between. For example, "supreme ADJ court" returns only documents with exactly "Supreme Court" and not any documents that only contain the words "supreme" and "court" separately.

Grouping Search Terms

A user can group search terms and phrases together using parentheses. For example, if you wished to search for information about most used e-mail protocols and character sets, you might search for "(government OR authorities) AND (prime ADJ minister)".