The Excite! Simple Query Form:
Building a search using the Excite! search interface form requires only four (4) simple steps:
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The Excite! simple query form interface is shown below. The Excite! search
engine has an interesting and unique feature which the site refers to as "concept searching."
Basically, it's searching using natural language. An interesting feature is that
the search engine will give extra weight to a term depending on the number of times
it's repeated in the search entry box. The online documentation also claims to be able
to construct concepts from natural language queries. So you might just try entering
the ideal title for the WWW document you're trying to find and see what happens.
Building a search using the Excite! search interface form requires only four (4) simple steps:
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Select the type of search you want Excite! to perform from the two choices at the
to of the form with corresponding radio buttons
 . When a radio button is
selected it looks like this -
 .
Note that the default type is to concept searching. The Search Type Options
are presented in the table below:
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Type your search terms and phrases, separated by spaces, into the input box. If you've selected concept searching you need only type in a natural phrase that describes what you're looking for. If you've selected keyword searching just enter the keywords you want to appear in the retrieved documents. You can give extra weight to a keyword by repeating it several times. |
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Next you need to select where Excite! will look for the terms and phrases you've
entered. There are several options represented by corresponding radio buttons
.
When a radio button is selected it looks like this -
. Note that the default
is for Excite! to search the WWW for your terms. The Search Location
Options are shown in the table below:
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Click on the button labeled Search when you have entered all your search
terms and phrases and selected the search type and location options you want.
This will transmit your search request to the Excite! engine and retrieve your
results. Excite! produces a list of links ranked by relative confidence. Each
link is accompanied by a brief summary paragraph to help in screening the results.
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NOTES:
Excite! returns a list of links, ten at a time, sorted by confidence. Confidence is calculated by several factors including proximity and number of occurrences of your search terms in each document. Confidence values are relative. Excite! lists those with the highest confidence values at the top of its output pages. If your search has retrieved a large number of documents you will find it somewhat tedious to have to go through them one page at a time. You might wish to focus your search as described below.
One of the most interesting features of the Excite! search engine is that it
allows you to focus your search by clicking on confidence icons
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associated with returned
documents. When you click
on one of these confidence icons Excite!
repeats the search based on the content of the selected document and returns a second
set of documents for review. The selected document is rated at a confidence of 100% by definition and all
related documents found are rated relative to it in descending order. This is a very
powerful feature of the engine.