NikoScope Help

From Nikonians Wiki

Latest revision as of 13:30, 30 January 2017

NikoScope is our powerful search engine. It indexes (searches) all of our forums, articles, blogs, galleries, The Nikonian eZine, membership and even other high quality photography sites. You can only search membership if you are a Nikonians member and are logged in.

Two Major Modes

'less options' (default, Single Search) Mode: You can do a criterion search on: Forum messages, Members, Galleries, Articles, Resources, eZine issues, Photo sites (other than nikonians.org, selected), and Everywhere (within the mentioned list)

You can currently make the above searches in each of three languages; English, German and French, or on all three.

"more options" (Advanced Search) Mode: By clicking on the "more options" button, you can make searches by forum, by date range posted, by member (username), sorted by several criteria. This is a good tool to track your own posts.

Definitions

A search criterion is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases. A Single Term is a single word such as "adirondak" or "d4". A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "adirondak landscape". Multiple terms can be combined together with boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below).

When looking for specific topics (for example: "tripod maintenance"), if you don't know the username of the member who posted it, you can leave that blank and still use it for searching in any (all) forums indexed, or an specific one and add a selection of the time frame you want to use, and listed by date in the sequence order of your choice.

If you are looking for posts by a member (yourself, for example) just enter the username in the 'posted by' window, choosing a time frame (anytime, last three days, past week, past month, past three months, past year, past 5 years)

Examples

To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol. To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol. The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "test" or "text" you can use the query: te?t

Multiple character wildcard searches look for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search: test*

You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term. Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

To search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search: roam~ This search will find terms like foam and roams.

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. This is equivalent to a union using sets. The symbol || can be used in place of OR. To search for documents that contain either "beautiful day" or just "beautiful" use the search criteria: "beautiful day" OR beautiful

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND. To search for documents that contain "beautiful day" and "beautiful summer" use the search criteria: "beautiful day" AND "beautiful summer"

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single document.

To search for documents that must contain "nikonians" and may contain "member" use the search criteria: +nikonians nikon The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol. To search for documents that contain "beautiful day" but not "beautiful summer" use the search criteria: "beautiful day" -"beautiful summer"

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.

To search for documents that contain "beautiful day" but not "beautiful summer" use the search criteria: "beautiful day" NOT "beautiful summer" Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results: NOT "beautiful summer"

The search engine supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub search criteria. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a separate phrase or term.

To search for either "beautiful" or "boring" and "summer" use the search criteria: (beautiful OR boring) AND summer

The search engine supports escaping special characters that are part of the search criteria. The current list of special characters contains: + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \

To escape any of these characters use the backslash \ before the character. For example to search for (1+1):2 use the search criteria: \(1\+1\)\:2

• This page was last modified on 30 January 2017, at 13:30.
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