Herndon's Informants | Edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis

Herndon's Informants Online is powered by the HtDig Search Engine. It can search the complete collection of pages online.

Default Search

To utilize Herndon's Informants Search, type in your keywords and click the search button.
HtDig will return:

-Documents from all pages that contain all of the keywords that where entered.
-HtDig will display in detailed format:

-the relevance rating (descending order)
-the document title (link to the web page)
-the relevance graphic
-a few lines of the document contain one or more of the keywords
-the document URL
-the date of last update
-the size of the document

Search by: All, Any, or Boolean

Matching All Keywords

Searching by "Matching All Keywords" will select web pages that contain all of the keywords. This is equivalent to using a Boolean AND expression.

Matching Any Keywords

Searching by "Matching Any Keyword" will select web pages that one of more of the keywords. This is equivalent to using a Boolean OR expression.

Boolean searches, which uses the "and", "or" and "not" logic, permit more sophisticated searching.

-Placing "and" between two keywords or phrases means that both words must be present for the web page to be selected.
-Placing "or" between two keywords means that only one of the keywords must be present for the web page to be selected.
-Placing "not" before a keyword means that a web page containing that particular keyword will not be selected.
-Parentheses may be used to group keywords.

Examples:

A valid Boolean search:

(undergraduate OR international) AND admissions
This should return web pages with information on either undergraduate or international admissions but not on graduate US admissions.

An invalid Boolean search:

(undergraduate admissions) or (international admissions)
This will return an error because there must be a Boolean expression between each keyword. HtDig expected either an "and" or an "or" before each admissions keyword.

Detailed vs. Summary Review

Type of Result: Detailed

Selecting Detailed Results will display the relevance rating, the web page title, a graphical representations of the relevance rating, a brief description of the web page, the web page URL and the date of update.

Type of Result: Summary

Selecting Detailed Results will display the relevance rating, the web page title, a graphical representations of the relevance rating.

Wildcard Searching

HtDig does support wildcard searching. The wildcard '*' can only be placed at the end of a string. For maximum efficiency, please type as much of the string as possible before utilizing the wildcard.

For example, to look for a place to live you may enter the string

hous*

HtDig will then find all pages with the words that begin with hous such as house, housing, etc.

Using wildcards will bring back many unrelated responses. In our example, it would have been better to have done a "Boolean Search" with the keywords,

house or housing

Relevance Rating
The relevance rating of a page is determined by the frequency with which the keywords occur. Additionally, the keywords are weighted according to their location in the document. Keywords located in the <head> of a document, i.e. the Title or in a <meta> tag are more heavily weighted that keywords located in the body of the document. Also, Keywords receive a higher rating the closer they are to the beginning of the document.