Help for Searching CryoNet Messages

Examples

• vitrification
• liquid nitrogen
• cold room LN2

More details on how CryoNet message searching works

• The search finds the messages that contain all the search terms entered. It thus computes an AND operation on the search terms; it does not support OR or NOT operations or more complex boolean combinations of search terms. Also, currently, the order of the search terms does not matter.
• The search considers upper case and lower case characters equivalent. "CRYONICS" and "cryonics" thus match the same messages.
• Only letters, digits, and underbars are considered parts of search terms; all other characters are ignored. Thus "abc@xyz.com" translates to the three terms "abc xyz com".
• It usually is not necessary to conduct separate searches for the variations of a word, such as "advance", "advances", "advancing", and "advancement", since the search code converts each search term to its stem using the Porter stemming algorithm.
• Commonly used terms, such as "and", are filtered out of searches. Also, very short (one or two character) and long words are ignored.
• Search results can be sorted three different ways:
  1. relevance - sorted by "relevance" score, based on word position within the message, number of occurences within the message, and proximity of terms within the message. The proximity rating approximates phrase searching, since phrases containing exactly the search terms will have higher ratings.
  2. oldest first - sorted by message number in increasing order
  3. newest first - sorted by message number in decreasing order
• The HTML files at the CryoNet web site are not indexed; only the message files can be searched.
• There are no searches specifically for words in the sender or subject lines, although the "relevance" sort option tends to favor words in the message headers since they are near the beginning of the messages.
• If you use the Advanced Search Form , the search options you choose will be "sticky"; they will be retained in the search form generated with the search results.
• The original indexing and search code were taken from the article "Roll Your Own Search Engine", which gives a simple Perl implementation. Subsequent enhancements have made the code no longer recognizable as that simple search engine.