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Administration: Omnidex Indexing

PowerSearch

Example

In this example of PowerSearch, a user is trying to find a person in the database. They searched the database with many incorrect pieces of information, but still found who they were looking for.

The user was looking for a Bill Meyers who lived on Fifth Avenue in NY, NY. They provided zip codes, phone numbers, and an email address. All of those were incorrect pieces of information, but they were still enough to find the record.




How PowerSearch Helped

This is a classic example of how difficult it can be to find what you are looking for in a database. The user entered all of the information he knew, and without PowerSearch, he would not have found what he was looking for. Here are the tools that PowerSearch used to locate the record:

Column User Input Actual Data PowerSearch Technique
First Name Bill William Synonym list of given names
Last Name Meyers Myers Phonetic search
Address 825 Fifth Avenue 825 5th Ave Synonym list of postal abbreviations
City NY New York Synonyn list of city abbreviations
Zip Code 10022 10021 Geographic search for nearby zip codes
Area Code 917 212 Synonym list of shared area codes
Phone Number 755-4686 775-4866 Transposition and incorrect digits
E-mail Address wmeyers@med.cornell.edu wmyers@med.cornell.edu Misspelling search

PowerSearch has a wide variety of tools that can be combined to help find data. Custom synonym lists and misspelling searches are most commonly used, but there are many other tools to choose from. PowerSearch also lets you develop your own synonym lists that are appropriate for your database.

Additional Resources

See also:

 
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admin/indexing/powersearch/example.txt ยท Last modified: 2016/06/28 22:38 (external edit)