igrep search:

igrep Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is igrep?
2. What does igrep search?
3. What can I do with an igrep search?
4. What makes your results better?
5. Can I specify boolean criteria in my searches?
6. Are igrep searches case-sensitive?
7. How can I get better search results?
8. Are there any more search tips that will help?
9. How do you determine relevancy of search results?
10. Why am I being told my search is too 'basic'?
11. Why am I being told to try again later?
12. Do I have to visit the igrep website to do an igrep search?
13. Can I do a more advanced search?
14. What is 'Proximity Searching'?
15. Is there any additional information I can bring back in the search results?
16. Can I search specific sites, instead of the whole network?
17. What is 'Fuzzy Searching'?
18. What is the 'Stemming Search'?
19. Why dont I see page excerpts when I do a 'Fuzzy' or 'Stem' search?
20. In what ways can I sort the results of a search?
21. Is there a way to filter my search by date?
22. What else can I do with the date an article was published?
23. Why am I being told to try searching for different words?
24. How does this 'suggestion' logic work?
25. I’m interested in advertising with you. Where can I find more information?

1. What is igrep?
Igrep is the first (and only) vertical niche search engine specifically aimed at developers and other people deeply interested in technology. It is a search engine designed to help programmers be more productive by enabling them to quickly locate exactly the information they need.
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2. What does igrep search?
Igrep’s searches are currently powered from Developer Shed’s vast range of content throughout its network of technology-focused websites. These include more than five million documents, frequently asked questions, and forums covering a wide range of technology issues. Areas covered include, but are not limited to, open source software, Microsoft and Microsoft-related technologies, website design and development, hardware guides and reviews, search engine optimization, and Web hosting.
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3. What can I do with an igrep search?
Because of the material we search, you will be able to examine an article and/or tutorial that covers your search term(s), read (and sign up for) a relevant newsletter, skim an FAQ covering the subject of your search, check out a forum on the topic in which you can participate, and so forth.

The igrep search engine hosts a plethora of advanced search features, such as fuzzy and stem matching, date filtering, proximity searches, and custom sort criteria. In basic terms, igrep allows you to not only retrieve more relevant information, but control how that information is presented to you.
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4. What makes your results better?
What we don’t search makes us almost as special as what we do search. First, we only index content – not navigation, or text ads, or other items that would be irrelevant to what our users need to find. Second, we only index technology-related content, so you won’t find hurricane glass when you search for “windows.” We don’t search those areas because we aren’t aiming to be a general search engine; we are narrowing our focus so that we can offer you greater depth – and relevance – when you use igrep to search your area of interest.
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5. Can I specify boolean criteria in my searches?
Yes, igrep fully supports the boolean operators AND, NOT, and OR. You can use those in igrep, via the universally accepted symbols: + for AND, - for NOT, and | (pipe) for OR. We don’t use the words themselves for the operators because they can also be used as valid content – and if we used them for operators, you wouldn’t be able to use them as search terms.

So, a search for php + asp will turn up items that mention both PHP and ASP. A search for php – asp will turn up items that mention PHP, but do not mention ASP. A search for php | asp would turn up items that mention either PHP or ASP.
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6. Are igrep searches case-sensitive?
No, igrep searches are not case sensitive. So if you search for encapsulation, we will match documents containing "encapsulation", "ENCAPSULATION", "Encapsulation", and yes even "EncApSUlaTioN".
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7. How can I get better search results?
To get better, or more relevant results, the best recommendation we can make would be for you to search for phrases. For example, a search for php code would return different results than a search for "php code". By adding quotes around specific phrases, you can cause the search results to be more relevant to what you are searching for.
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8. Are there any more search tips that will help?
As a matter of fact, yes. The igrep search engine does not index punctuation. This being the case, all punctuation is automatically removed prior to performing a search by the query parser. To be sure you get the most relevant results, you may want to perform many of your searches without punctuation.
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9. How do you determine relevancy of search results?
There are many things we do to determine the relevancy of the results that you see in the search results pages. For one thing, we determine the number of times your search words appear in the matched documents. Obviously the more times your search word or phrases appear in a document, the more relevant it is. Additionally, we do the same relevancy tests on the title of the document. Then, finally, we weight the title for the overall relevancy, since if your search words appear in the title of the page, the results should be especially relevant to your query. Although there are other things we do when calculating the overall relecanvy of the result documents, these have the most impact.
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10. Why am I being told my search is too 'basic'?
The igrep query parser uses a scoring system to score the relevancy of your search. Words in your query that are common 'stopwords' or that are very short (less than 3 characters in length) are given a score of zero. A cumulative score above zero is required for the search to actually execute. If we are going to load the igrep search engine with queries, they might as well be relevant!
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11. Why am I being told to try again later?
To cut down on flooding of our servers, we have instituted a basic level of protection. You are only able to submit a search to our database once every 2 seconds. Since most people don't process a whole page of search results in under 2 seconds, we don't really consider this a problem.
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12. Do I have to visit the igrep website to do an igrep search?
No you don’t – well, maybe once. You can use the igrep toolbar, which works with either Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers. Just point your browser to http://www.igrep.com/toolbar to get the download, and install.
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13. Can I do a more advanced search?
Yes, visit our Advanced Search page, where a plethora of options is available to help you locate your information more efficiently.
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14. What is 'Proximity Searching'?
If you type in more than one keyword to search on (which is often the case), you can specify a requirement that these words need to be in a certain proximity of each other, to be a relevant hit. You are able to specify how close the words need to be, in any number of 'words', 'sentences', or 'paragraphs'. For example, a search for php code will return different results if searched without a proximity condition, than with a proximity of 2 words. See our Advanced Search page to use proximity searching.
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15. Is there any additional information I can bring back in the search results?
Yes, visit our Advanced Search page, where you can select additional fields to display in the search results.
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16. Can I search specific sites, instead of the whole network?
Yes, you can select any combination of our sites to run your query against. You can select these on our Advanced Search page.
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17. What is 'Fuzzy Searching'?
The Fuzzy Search is a phonetic search of your search terms. Since this searches a much wider search spectrum, it is a more intensive and time consuming search, but can be useful if you do not know how to spell your search target. Keep in mind, also, that acronyms such as PHP and IEEE have no real 'sound pattern' to them, and will return invalid results. You can access the Fuzzy Search on our Advanced Search page.
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18. What is the 'Stemming Search'?
The Stemming Search is another useful tool to help find the information you are looking for more effectively. This search will break your search term down to it's 'base words', and search for all patterns of such. For example, a search for 'cropping' will find matches for 'crop', 'cropped', and 'cropping'. Be aware that just like the fuzzy search, this is a more intensive process and more time consuming than a normal search. You can access the Stemming Search on our Advanced Search page.
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19. Why dont I see page excerpts when I do a 'Fuzzy' or 'Stem' search?
When you execute a 'Fuzzy' or 'Stem' search, you are effectively choosing an option that changes the search terms you are searching for. This being the case, our engine is unable to return an associated excerpt from the document, since your original search terms most likely do not exist within it's contents.
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20. In what ways can I sort the results of a search?
We offer 4 different methods of sorting the information that is returned by your search. The first method (and default) is relevancy, wherein the most relevant documents are listed first. Next we have pagehits, which sorts the documents in desending order, based on the number of times your search keywords are found in each documents. Finally, we allow you to sort by the date the documents were created, both ascending and descending.
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21. Is there a way to filter my search by date?
Yes. We give you the ability to search only items in the last 7, 30, 90, or 180 days if you so please. Visit the Advanced Search page to filter your searches by date.
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22. What else can I do with the date an article was published?
There are three ways to manipulate data using the creation date of content. First, you can limit your searches to only show you documents created in a certain timeframe. Next, you can have the creation date displayed on the search results page, for reference. Finally, you can choose to sort your results by date, both ascending and descending.
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23. Why am I being told to try searching for different words?
We have a feature that can 'suggest' alternative search terms. If you execute a search that returns less than 20 matches, or none at all, we will suggest an alternative search that may yield better results.
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24. How does this 'suggestion' logic work?
Our suggestion logic disassembles your search phrase into individual keywords. We then do a fuzzy search through our thesaurus on each one, which brings back a list of matches along with how many times each one is found in our database. We then pick the one with the most document hits, and use that while assembling the suggestion. So, in laymans terms, we find the best match in our database for each keyword in your search phrase and build a new suggestion from the results.
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25. I’m interested in advertising with you. Where can I find more information?
Visit our corporate site at http://www.developershed.com/advertise.php to learn more about becoming an advertiser on our network.
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