SOMIS - Search Maestro, Help

Help for Search Maestro

Please read this if you are looking for an EMail Directory or Addresses for Staff or Students at the University of Dundee.

General Comments
Queries are not case sensitive. The engine stores all the terms (words) in lower case. Whatever case is used in a query it is translated to lower case.
Search Maestro only indexes words (a-z characters). It does not index numbers or full-stops, commas, slashes etc. Queries like "a.n.other" or "C.V.C.P." fail because at the query stage the characters which are not indexed are not filtered out. So a query for "Dr. Bloggs" is rejected because it should have been entered as "Dr Bloggs" or "dr bloggs".
Hyphens [if the last incarnation of the cgi programs works] are treated as a minus sign, thus they should only preceed a term to be excluded from the hits.
Restrictions - Stopwords
We treat as Stopwords any words which are not indexed. The operators of Maestro can define any words - depending on the frequency they occur or their significance as stopwords. See lists of stopwords.
Maestro does not index words which are one character long, and words which are over 64 characters long. Finally Maestro does not index numbers, something which is to be fixed in a future release of the software.
Restrictions - Grammatical Rules
Maestro employs a set of grammatical rules to allow it to locate synonyms of words. In general it drops from the end of words strings like "ing", "es", "s". See the grammar rules.

Wildcards. *
If you enter acc*, you will search for acc, but also for accurate, accustom, accumulator and you'll also find out department of Accountancy.
Restrictions. + or -
If you enter +warp, you will search for hits with the term warp. If you enter -windows, you will search for hits without the term windows.
Tips
If you want all your terms to be included, each term must be preceeded by "+". You can then refine the search by using "-" to exclude specific terms.
Complex queries.
Example: maestro +warp* -windows
Example: +degree +regulations +postgraduate -undergraduate