Help

Simple Search

In order to search with FAROO, you must simply enter some describing words and the press "Enter"-key (or click at the FAROO search button). Then you receive a list of relevant search results.

Automatic "AND"-search

FAROO returns only pages, which contain all of your search terms. You do not need to enter "AND" between the search terms. In order to narrow a search, you simply have to enter more terms.

Stop words

FAROO ignores common words and letters, which are known as "stop words". FAROO skips automatically words like "the" and "www" as well as single letters, as such terms help only little in specifying a search, at the same time they are slowing down the search and allocating index storage space.

Keyword in context

A search result from FAROO contains one or several excerpt from the web page, to give you an insight in which context your search term occurs within the page. This is also referred to as "Keyword in Context" or KWIC.

Capitalization

When searching with FAROO the upper and lower case forms of a search term are found. E.g. searches for "faroo", "FAROO" and "FaRoO" provide identical results.

Umlaut

When entering a search query you may type the German "umlaut" chars ä ü ö ß or use the transcriptions ae, ue, oe and ss. E.g. searches for "Muenchen" und "München" provide identical results.

Compounds

FAROO provides identical search results for compound variants, e.g. for search-engine, "search-engine" and "search engine". However the search for searchengine provides differing results.

Words with apostrophes

When after the apostrophe (´ or ') follow less than two chars, then these chars are truncated (london's -> london), otherwise the apostrophe is removed (ku'damm -> kudamm).

Stemming

When indexing and when entering search terms FAROO reduces the different morphological variants of a word to its common stem. This is referred to as stemming. Therefore when searching "house" also "houses" are found.

Phrase search

Groups of words, also called "Phrases", may be searched for if the group of words is put into quotation marks: "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain".

NEAR operator

Search terms connected with the NEAR operator must not be distant further than 10 words. The order of search terms has no meaning. Something between the exact phrase search and the AND-combination of search terms.

Boolean operators and parenthesis

For the logical combination of search terms and the expression of complex queries there are three Boolean operators available. These are:

• AND (+): Results have to fulfill all conditions of the search query, which are combined by AND. Documents which fulfill only one condition are not found. AND is the default operator, and therefore needn’t to be stated explicitly.
• OR (|): Results have to fulfill at least one of the conditions of the search query, which are combined by OR.
• NOT (-): Results may not contain the term preceded with NOT.

When combining different operators you have to consider, that they hold a different priority (precedence) (Phrase=1, NEAR=2, NOT=3, AND=4, OR=5). Operators with a higher priority will be processed first (from left to right). The processing order may be controlled by using parenthesis.

Natural Language Query

Natural Language Query - NLQ allows to express your search request in common speech: "Who is the president of the USA ?" or "When Elvis Presley was born?".

Actualization

The actualization of the index is occurs almost in real time. As soon as an arbitrary FAROO user visits a new or changed web page, the distributed index is updated, and all FAROO users receive from this time on the updated search results.

Char sets

On input of search terms and display of results are all Unicode utf-8 char sets supported. This includes also Chinese, Japanese or Cyrillic fonts.

Number of search results

FAROO returns 10 results per page at maximum. The total number of results is restricted to 1000. If this is not enough, you may refine your search to get thousand more precise results.

Language of results

FAROO searches within web pages from all countries. Therefore search results may contain web pages in English, Japanese, Spain or other languages.

Language of user interface

The FAROO user interface is available in localized versions for German, English, French, Spain, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi. FAROO switches automatically to the appropriate Language (according to the operating system).

Supported Browsers

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0.2, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.7.8 or Opera 9 (Display of XML files with XSLT transformation)