[1]Principia Cybernetica Web

                                 Common Search Errors

Typical mistakes when [2]searching in PCP Web:

   Wrong spelling
          e.g. "Weiner" instead of "Wiener", "Bertalanfy" instead of "Bertalanffy"
          or "optimalty" instead of "optimality". Make sure you know the spelling of
          names, and check your typing. If you are not sure about the ending of a
          word, leave the last part out. E.g. "Bertalanf" would find both
          "Bertalanfy" and "Bertalanffy"

   Searching for phrases
          The PCP web search engine only searches for exact strings, not for
          approximate phrases, like most search engines (e.g. AltaVista, Lycos,
          WebCrawler, etc.). If you are not sure about the exact phrase just use the
          most important words. E.g instead of searching for "what is systems
          theory?", search for "systems theory". The latter will find a document
          called "What are cybernetics and systems theory?" which would not be found
          by the former search.

   Searching with an implied "or"
          A search containing different words e.g. "cybernetics systems evolution"
          will only find nodes that contain ALL these words (which is unlikely).
          This is different from common search engines (e.g. AltaVista, Lycos,
          WebCrawler, etc.) where the occurrence of ANY of those words in a
          documents will add points to the relevance score for a search. If you
          would like to use such a relevance search, use the AltaVista search of
          PCP-Web on the[3] index page.

   Too specific search string
          Don't put too much information in your string if a more general string is
          likely to find what you are looking for. E.g. looking for "W. Ross Ashby"
          will miss all references to "W. R. Ashby" or "Ross Ashby". Better search
          for "Ashby" instead.

   Searching in "titles" for words that exist only in the "full text"
          The default (first) search in PCP Web will only examine titles of
          documents. Not generally used words are unlikely to be part of a title,
          but may be present in the full text of a document. For example, you won't
          find any reference to "Wiener" (the founder of cybernetics) in a title,
          since there is as yet no node devoted to him, but plenty of references in
          nodes on the history or bibliography of cybernetics

   Using punctuation and other marks
          The syntax of PCP web does not understand any specific punctuation marks,
          such as quotes, ",", ":", ""., "/", etc. Using these signs will mean that
          they will be interpreted as part of a string. E.g. the search string
          "cybernetics/founder" will find neither "cybernetics" nor "founder". It is
          very unlikely you will find strings with punctuation marks, so best leave
          them out altogether.
            _____________________________________________________________________

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References

   1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCHERR.html#PCP-header
   2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCH.html
   3. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/INDEX.html#altavista
   4. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COPYR.html
   5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REFERPCP.html
   6. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
   7. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/NAVIG.html
   8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCH.html
   9. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ALPINDEX.html
  10. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
  11. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAKANNOT.html
  12. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$annotform?

[USEMAP]
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCHERR.html#PCP-header
   1. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
   2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HOWWEB.html
   3. http://pcp.lanl.gov/SEARCHERR.html
   4. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCHERR.html
   5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SERVER.html
   6. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$randomlink?searchstring=.html
   7. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
   8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html#SEARCHERR
   9. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCH.html