FAQ

Q. What is Explorit Research Accelerator?

A. This service is driven by Explorit Research Accelerator, a deep web search portal designed to give researchers quick access to a multitude of credible collections. Researchers can take advantage of Explorit's many tools to narrow their searches, drill down into topics and discover new information collections.

Q. What is Federated Search?

A. Federated search is a powerful way to comprehensively search multiple databases in real time. Instead of crawling and indexing static content like Google or other popular search engines, Explorit simultaneously queries select, high-quality collections. While this usually takes a few seconds longer, it ensures superior results.

For instance, federated search helps researchers avoid outdated articles and spam, uncovering only the most pertinent information. Federated search is also able to search private or other collections that can't be indexed - a more common situation than you might imagine. For more about federated search, please visit The Federated Search Blog.

Q. Why isn't Explorit as fast as Google?

A. Explorit simultaneously searches collections in real time, as though a search was being conducted on each individual website. As soon as information is published within a collection, Explorit can find it for you. You can use the "Summary of All Results" link to view the number of results Explorit chooses from each collection, as well as the total number of results each collection returns (including those Explorit chooses not to include in your results display.)

Q. What's the difference between basic search and advanced search?

A. Basic search (from the homepage of Explorit) conducts a search of all the collections included within the category you select. Advanced search contains tools you can use to perform a more precise search, like the ability to specify a title or author, narrow your search to a publication date, or even select specific collections.

Q. What are the different tools on the results page?

A. Explorit has several different tools that can help you search the deep web:

1. Advanced Search - Allows you to perform a more specific search through fields and to select particular collections or categories.
2. Your Selections - Creates a list of the results you select, which you can later download, email or print.
3. Create an Alert (not available with all search services) - If this feature is enabled on the search service you are using, you can save time by using Explorit's Alerts feature to automatically search for you. This simple-to-use, powerful feature will search the deep web for your terms, then send you an email or RSS feed when it finds new content about the research issues that matter to you.
4. Custom Search (not available with all search services) - If this feature is enabled on the search you are using, you can customize advanced search settings that Explorit will remember 5. Clear Selections - Empties your list of saved results.
6. Print Results - Conveniently prints the page you are viewing.
7. Email Results - Allows you to email the results list to yourself or a colleague.
8. Bookmark This Search – Provides many options to share your search results.
7. Session Preferences - Lets you choose how the results of your search will be displayed.
8. Summary of All Results - Displays the name and availability of each collection, the number of results Explorit chose to take from the collection, and the total number of results the collection said was available, including those Explorit chose not to take. See "What do the numbers under Summary of All Results mean?" for more information.
9. Edit Search – Lets you narrow your search by entering advanced search information. 10. Clusters - Allow you to drill down quickly into more specific search results by grouping the results by topics, authors, publications, publishers or publication dates.

Q. How can I refine my search?

A. You can refine your query by using a more specific search term or phrase. To further limit results, try:
1. Sorting by date, author or title.
2. Limiting your search to a specific collection.
3. Viewing your results by topic (see "What are clusters?" below.)

Q. What are clusters?

A. Clusters are groups of topics. You can use this powerful tool to drill down into a topic that's related to your search term, giving you more specific, narrow results. You'll find this feature on the left side of the results page.

Q. How can I save my search results?

A. Click on the blue-and-white page icon next to the result, which will select that result and save it. To view all your selected results, click the "My Selections" link on the top of the results page. These results can be downloaded into a bibliographic citation reader, emailed or printed. All selections will appear for the life of your browser session, so you can keep compiling results while you continue using Explorit, even if you perform more than one search. Note that once you leave Explorit, close your browser or restart your computer, you will lose your list of "My Selections"

You can also email or print a your "My Selections." list by selecting "Print Page" or "Email Results" at the top of the results page.

Q. Can I export my search results?

A. Simply select the results that you want to export, click on the "My Selections" link and then click on the "Citations" link. The Citations tool will download your results into any bibliographic tool that uses .ris format, such as RefWorks or EndNote. You can also download the .ris file onto your desktop.

Q. How do I search just one or two collections?

A. When you conduct an advanced search, just select or deselect the individual collections you wish to search.

Q. Can I get to the native interface of the collection from my search results? Can I get full text access?

A. You can access the native interface of any collection through Explorit by clicking on a result's title. If the collection supports full text access (and if you are authenticated when subscription-based collections require) then you can view the full text. The collection homepage can be reached by clicking on the collection's name on your search results list.

Q. Why do I get different results every time I search with the same term, even when only a few minutes have passed?

A. This actually means that Explorit is working the way it should. There are two reasons why you'll see different results each time you search with the same term.

First, Explorit search other collections in real time. Many collections are updated frequently, and if any of them receive new information between your searches, you will accordingly see new results the next time you search.

Second, Explorit is persistent and and caches results. This means that when even if you're done viewing the results of your search, Explorit continues obtaining more results. Also, the "incremental results" feature causes Explorit to display results as quickly as it receives them, while it's waiting for more results from slower collections. If those slower collections return results after you initiate a second search, you will see different results. (See What are incremental results? for more information.)

Q. How does Explorit decide which results are more relevant and therefore rank higher?

A. By default, Explorit displays a relevance-ranked results list, with the highest-ranking results at the top of the list. Several factors contribute to a higher ranking, including the length of the title, the occurrence of the search term within the title and snippet, and the frequency of the search term's occurrence. If a collection presents highly relevant results for a query, Explorit will automatically retrieve additional results from that collection instead of only returning the first page of its results. Because native collection relevance ranking engines vary, Explorit's sought-after ranking approach normalizes results from multiple collections for a consistent, relevance-ranked results list.

Q. What do the numbers under Summary of All Results mean?

A. The Summary of All Results list shows all collections that are searched. There are two sets of numbers in this list: "Ranked" and "Available" results. "Ranked" indicates the number of results Explorit chose to take from each collection, while "Available" represents the total number of results that the collection told Explorit exists, including those Explorit chose not to include in your results.

Why aren't these two numbers equal? That's a good question.

Many collections require Explorit to "screen scrape" the results (a fancy way of saying that Explorit pretends it's a human and literally reads the results web page that the collection presents.) When Explorit has to obtain search results by screen scraping, it will usually only read the first page of results. Explorit can tell some collections how many results to put on each page, which increases the number of results it will obtain from that collection. In general, results from such collections will range from 10 to 100, depending on the number of results available from a particular collection (i.e. if Explorit specifies 100 results on a page, but there are only 39 results, Explorit will only receive 39 results).

A note about screen scraping: many in the federated search world view screen scraping as a substandard method for obtaining search results from collections. We agree. However, it is a necessary evil when a federated search is performed using those publishers who don't make it easy for a non-human (i.e. Explorit) to obtain results for their collections. Explorit is designed to use screen scraping only when absolutely necessary. If you would like to learn more, you can read the Federated Search Blog's excellent article about screen scraping called "Content access basics - Part I - screen scraping.

With other collections, Explorit accesses search results using an XML gateway (again, a fancy term for computer-to-computer communications.) Usually, Explorit can get an unlimited number of results from such collections, although for the sake of speed and performance, Explorit usually limits the number of results it takes to 200 or fewer, depending on the value and nature of a particular collection. However, some collections don't rank their results, so depending on the value of that collection, Explorit may request more results so that it can perform ranking itself. Again, the Federated Search Blog has a great article providing more depth on this topic, entitled "Content access basics - Part II- XML,".

Some collections may have tens or even hundreds of thousands of results. Explorit usually limits the number of results it takes to 200 or fewer, depending on the collection. This is done for a number of performance reasons. First, to obtain more than 200 results from those collections it screen-scrapes, Explorit would need to literally read page after page of results. Most researchers simply don't have the time to wait that long. Second, if Explorit did take the time to pull in every result from every collection, it could potentially have millions of results to sort, de-duplicate, rank, and display - for each and every search performed. Such a process would take vast amounts of computing power and network bandwidth, and the publishers of the collections would understandably become quite annoyed with all the work (i.e. network traffic and performance hits) associated with these enormous searches and vast results downloading.

Q. I counted the collections listed in Summary of All Results, and they definitely don't equal the number of collections the results page says was searched. Why is there a discrepancy?

A. The collection count on the results page (i.e. "*some-number* of 262 sources complete" at the top) does indicate the correct number of collections being searched. This number is larger than the number in the Summary of All Results because Explorit is a federated search that is searching other federated collections. For instance, www.science.gov is included in the collections being searched. www.science.gov, itself, searches around 50 other collections. The Summary of All Results identifies all the collections Explorit searches, which means if Science.gov is down, approximately 50 collections will be missing from the results pages.

Q. How does Explorit calculate the numbers of "Available" and "Ranked" results?

A. The number of "Ranked" results is the total of all the results Explorit has chosen to add to your search results page from the collections it has searched.

The number of "Available" results is the total of all the results that are actually available at all the collections Explorit has searched, including those results Explorit decided weren't relevant to your search. Explorit will usually limit the number of results it brings back from a single collection to no more than 200, even though the particular collection may have tens or hundreds of thousands of results for the given search term.

Q. What are "incremental results?"

A. To answer this question, it's important to keep in mind that Explorit is a federated search engine that searches other collections in real time. These other collections are operated by other companies, and are all very different in their age, value, capability, speed and overall performance.

Explorit is a rare breed of federated search; it won't make you wait forever while results are being compiled from all the collections being searched. Imagine if it did, and one - or several - of the collections were offline. You could wait a couple of minutes or longer before seeing any results.

To speed up the search process, Explorit displays results immediately from those collections that provide results immediately. Then, after the slower collections have provided their results, Explorit will ask you if you want to incorporate them into your results view. Why ask you instead of just doing it? Well, if Explorit obtained high-ranking results from the slower collections, it could change the way your first page of results looks - meaning that if you were reading a particular result, it could disappear, and we felt you might find that frustrating.