About Searching

Contents:

• Search Introduction
• The Search Page

The Netscape Compass Server contains an index of documents or other resources on the network. In most cases, those items are web-pages, word-processing files, text files, and websites. What information the index contains is controlled by the server administrator.

Part of Netscape Compass Server is a Verity search engine that lets you search for documents. To search for documents, you go to the The Search Page and type one or more keywords describing the information you wish to locate in the search box. Then you click the Search button. For example, if you want to find a white paper on Internet technology, you can search for documents containing the word Internet.

To find documents indexed in the Netscape Compass Server, you can do any of the following:

• Search the entire Netscape Compass Server. To search for documents, type some keywords in the box and click the Search button. This displays a list of documents that match your search criteria.
  
• Search within categories. In cases where neither a global search nor browsing categories locates what you want, or if the desired category contains too many documents, you can perform a search within that category.
  
• Browse categories. The documents indexed in the Netscape Compass Server are normally assigned to various categories and subcategories, and you can often use those to locate documents without searching.

For more information on determining when to browse and when to search, see When Should I Browse and When Should I Search?.

When you search or browse, you see lists of documents that display information about each document. This information might include:

• The title of the document
• The name of the person who wrote or created the document
• The date when the document was last updated
• Document keywords
• The subject under which the document is categorized
• The document's URL (web address)

There are two classes or levels of search:

• Simple searches using the Netscape Compass Server Search page
  
• Complex searches using either the Advanced Search page or by entering sophisticated search syntax on the Search page

The first thing you see when you access the Netscape Compass Server is the Search page. 
 

By default, the Search page is divided into three sections:

• Header and Toolbar
• Navigation and Query
• Document List

Note that your system administrator can add or remove Search page features, so your Search page may not look exactly like the one shown above.

At the top of the Search page is the toolbar. By default, the toolbar contains:

• My Compass, a newsletter that contains the most recent updates for the categories you have subscribed to
  
• Category Browser. A tool you can use to navigate through your site's categories.
  
• Help (this online user's guide)

(Your site administrator may have added or removed some tools.)

Below the toolbar is the Search page's navigation and query section, which consists of:

• The name of your current category or subcategory. In the example shown above, the current category is Sample Knowledge Chart whichi is this site's top-level category. (When you first use Netscape Compass Server, you start at your site's top-level category.)
  
• The search box where you enter the word or phrase you want to search for and the Search button you click when you have entered what you want to search for.
  
• Links to the search hints page and the Advanced Search Page.
• The buttons you click to tell Netscape Compass Server where to search. You can choose "Search in all categories" which will search all of the documents on your network regardless of category, or "Search in current category" which limits the search to your current category subcategory and all of its subcategories.
  
• The names of subcategories (if any) that you can go to by clicking the subcategory name. The number of further subcategories immediately below each named subcategory is shown in parentheses next to the subcategory name. For example, "Business Conditions (76)" indicates that there are 76 further subcategories (not 76 documents) immediately under Business Conditions.
  

Below the list of subcategories are the names and descriptions of all the documents in the current category or all the documents found by your last search. (See Document Lists for more information.)