About Engineering Workbench's keyword search

For general search information, see Overview of search.

Introduction to Engineering Workbench's keyword search

Engineering Workbench's keyword search provides advanced capabilities beyond conventional keyword searches, such as the following:

• Stemming, where all variations of a word are automatically searched based on the word root
• Proximity ranking, where results are sorted based on the relative proximity of keywords in a sentence

These advanced capabilities simplify your queries, improve the precision of your results, and ensure that your search retrieves all relevant information.

As an added benefit, keyword search results that are retrieved by means of the Researcher Patent Collections include actual relevant sentences, and not just a list of documents (the best you can get with conventional keyword searches). Therefore, the keyword search provides highly specific and relevant information without requiring you to read entire documents to find it.

About Boolean expressions

Keyword queries are logical expressions that retrieve results based on the presence or absence of specific keywords in a document. A keyword query returns a result if the Boolean expression evaluates as TRUE for the entire document.

You can enter Boolean expressions by explicitly typing the operators <NOT> or <NEAR> within angle brackets to distinguish them from search words. If you explicitly type the operators <AND>,<OR>, or both (but you do not include <NOT>or <NEAR>), your query is processed as a natural language query, not as a keyword query (see Running several queries simultaneously).

Boolean operators (except <NOT>) must be positioned between two operands. For example, it is not correct to type a Boolean expression as <AND> engine, but it is correct to type it as automobile <AND> engine, where automobile and engine are the two operands. See Common mistakes in keyword queries for more information.

Order of precedence

When you do not specify in your keyword query the order in which conditions are to be evaluated, the following default order of precedence is used:

• <+NEAR>
• <NEAR>
• <NOT>
• implicit <AND> (<space> character between operands)
• <IN>
• <AND>
• <WITH>
• <OR>

To override default precedence rules, you can use parentheses. Consider the following expression:

(car <AND> (Lexus <NOT> (1986 <OR> 2001))

This query retrieves documents that do not include 1986 or 2001, but that do include both car and Lexus.

If this expression did not have parentheses and was entered as:

car <AND> Lexus <NOT> 1986 <OR> 2001

it would be evaluated as:

(car <AND> (Lexus <NOT> 1986)) <OR> 2001