Help / Users Guide / How does the search engine work?
The MagPortal.com search engine tries to do a case-insensitive match of your query against the article title, description, authors, and the body of the article. When processing your query, it is sliced into “words” (sets of a adjacent alpha-numeric characters) and all other characters are discarded. Any words which don’t match any articles are discarded, and any words which are very common (like “the”) are also discarded. Only articles that match all of the remaining words are presented to you. To see which words were actually used (not discarded) in the search, look at the “Actual search terms used” output below the search box on the results page. By default, the output is ordered by the “quality” of the match. The quality is determined by using a mathematical formula (standard term-frequency inverse-document frequency algorithm, not related to Hot Neuron SimilarityTM) which takes into account how often the search term appears in the document (relative to the total length of the docum
