About Your Search Results

About your search results.

When you perform a search, the search engine will produce a list of pages ranked in order of “relevance” (the most relevant pages are placed first and the least relevant pages are placed last). The relevance is marked by a number from 0000 to 1000. 0000 indicates files with the least relevance and 1000 indicates files with the most relevance (the search engine can’t read your mind, its idea of what is most relevant and your idea of what is most relevant may be different). If you are not happy with your search results, read the following sections for suggestions.

A Word is Too Common.

Use of common words (such as the) cause the message

err: a word is too common

For example, the stars will always return an error message (just type stars instead).

Not enough pages.

If you get the error message

err: no results

or you did not find the information you want, there could be several possible reasons:

You may have misspelled a word. If so, you probably will not get any results.
Many words take suffixes at the end. The following are some of the more common suffixes:
-s (plural noun), -ed (verb), -ing (verb), -er (adjective/adverb), -est (adjective/adverb), -ian (adjective)
Thus many words have at least two variants (such as galaxy and galaxies). The search engine does not know about any of these variants, hence some searches will not include all possible pages.
If you place an asterisk at the end of a word, any word that begins with the same prefix will match. For example use planet* to match both planet and planets and observator* to match observatory and observatories.
When a request consists of two or more words, only pages that mention both words will be returned. If you want pages that mention any of a group of words use or. For example, use saturn or jupiter to find pages that refer to either saturn or jupiter.
There are some words which mean similar things. You may want to try both. For example:
- moon or lunar
- jupiter or jovian
- sun or solar
- galaxy or galactic
- photograph or picture or image
You may want to try a broader word. For example if you are interested in mercury, try planet.
The information may not exist on this web site. This search engine only searches the University Lowbrow Astronomers web site for pages. If you think the page you are looking for is located outside the Lowbrow site, go to the Lowbrow links page.
It is possible the information exists, but has not been entered into the search engine. If this problem persists, Contact Us.

Too many pages.

If there is too much information, you can look at the first few pages. You may find what you are looking for that way. The most relevant pages are often (but not always) placed first. If this doesn’t help, you can refine your search by issuing a longer request (a request with additional words):

Use or to indicate that you want a page that mentions either of two different words. For example:
saturn or jupiter
will find pages that mention either saturn or jupiter.
Use and to indicate that you want a page that mentions two or more different words. For example:
black and hole
Use parenthesis to construct more complex queries. For example:
(saturn or jupiter) and (image or picture)

About Your Search Results