Searching UC Online with Panoptic: a basic guide

Simple Searches

Input your search terms -- keywords, etc. -- into the Panoptic textbox and click on the Search button to the right.. You may search the entire UC website, or limit your search to the sites listed on the right hand side, as illustrated below. Here we search the entire UC website for new media

Panoptic search screen illustration

Panoptic will then retrieve from its indexes all web pages that contain these terms and rank them in terms of their relevance score. This takes into account the relative rarity of the search terms, the frequency with which they occur in the document and the length of the document. Here are the first two results - of 917 -- from the above search of the entire UC system:

Results of Panoptic search illustration

You will see that their relevance scores are 100 and 99 respectively, which may surprise users who are looking for a course on "new media". (We will will deal with this problem below, under Refining Your Search).

Please note:

search terms can appear anywhere in the retrieved document and in any order,
the search terms do not have to be adjacent in the retrieved document,
if there are more than five search terms, fully-matching results need not necessarily contain occurrences of all query words: instead, documents are ranked by their relevance score,
stop-words - extremely common terms like "it" or "and" or 'the" - are excluded from searches unless the query contains fewer than three non-stopwords, e.g. "the Union".
Searches are not case sensitive, so IT is not distinguished from it
Documents in PDF format are not retrieved, although other web pages that point to them may be.

Refining Your Search

As we have seen, a search on "New Media" does not necessarily put documents on "new media" at the top of the list. We can do so, however if we punctuate our query to require that the two words are adjacent in the order specifies, i.e. as a phrase. Similarly we may want to use truncated terms -- e.g. to look for all words that begin with 'comput'. We may want to exclude terms, or we may want to use alternative terms. All this is provided for by the Panoptic Query Language, and here are the basic details. Please note that the punctuation is significant. That means that if, for example, you are searching for a phrase, you must include the inverted commas when you input the search terms.

Query type	Examples	Explanation
Phrase	"new media"	Searches for the exact phrase new media, all words adjacent and in the order specified.
Truncation	econom* onics matic*	Searches for all words beginning with econom, ending with onics or including matic.
Alternatives (i.e. OR logic)	[journalism media] masters	Searches for the word masters plus either journalism or media.
Exclusion (NOT logic)	applied -science (NB: no space between the minus sign and the following word)	Searches for documents that contain the word applied but not science.

For additional commands, see the Panoptic Query Language page at http://search.canberra.edu.au/search/UserHelp/querylanguage.html

Advanced Searches

This feature is unlike the Advanced Search facility you may be familiar with in other WWW search engines such as Google or Metacrawler, most of whose functions are covered by the Simple Search Query Language outlined above.

The Panoptic Advanced Search allows ordinary keyword searches to be replaced with, or refined by, reference to metadata elements included in WWW pages, although not visible on your browser, and input according to Australian and international standards. Such elements may include

The author of the page
A list of keywords
Document classification
Date of publication to the WWW

To this may be added the WWW page title that usually appears on the blue title bar on your browser, and which may or may not coincide with the main heading that appears on the page itself.

In the example below we are searching for an exhibition of illustrated books for children called Get Real! Our search terms are the words get and real plus the metadata keyword children.

Metadata search screen example

More Information

For more about Panoptic see their pages at http://search.canberra.edu.au/search/UserHelp/

Return to the Panoptic Search Page

Return to the Panoptic Advanced Search Page

Page Content problems: Andrew Clarke

Last updated: 2 April 2003