TITLE
    Tech Info Library: Basic Search Techniques
Article ID:
Created:
Modified: 		22104
10/23/97
4/18/00
TOPIC
DISCUSSION

    What Is The Technical Information Library?

    The Apple Technical Information Library (TIL) is Apple's official technical support database. The TIL database contains over 15,000 articles related to product specifications, reference documentation, and Apple and third-party product technical issues. It is updated daily with new information and is the same database that Apple employees use to answer support questions.

    Searching the TIL

    The TIL is a full text indexed database which means that every word in every article is indexed for searching. This provides a high likelihood that your search will return a hit or hits, however, very broad searches can return more hits than are useful. To reduce the number of hits you need to narrow your search to a specific topic or issue.

    The TIL uses boolean operators for searching rather than natural language. This means that rather than typing "Why won't my PowerBook battery charge?", you would type "PowerBook and battery and charge". The word "and" in the search query tells the search engine to find any articles that contain the words PowerBook, battery, charge.

    Additional boolean operators are listed in the following table:

    Note: AND, OR, and AND NOT are treated as operators by default. If you want to use them as literal words, place them in quotes. Capitalization does not matter for the operators. Examples using theses operators can be found in TIL article 58444: " Tech Info Library: Advanced Search Techniques ".

    Typing These Operators
    Finds
    and Documents that contain both the conditions or words separated by AND
    and not Documents that do not contain the condition or word following AND NOT
    or Documents that contain either of the conditions or words separated by OR
    , (comma) Same documents as OR, but increases the relevance ranking of a document when the document contains more than one matching condition or word
    @ Documents which contain both of the words that are separated by @, as long as the words are next to each other in the documents. (Do not place spaces between @ and either word.)

    There are three selections for what your search query looks for when in the main TIL window at http://til.info.apple.com . There are radio buttons for searching the title, article text, or article number. Most searches will be performed against the article text, unless you know the title or number of a specific article.


Document Information
Product Area: Apple General Information
Category: Searching the TIL
Sub Category: General Topics

Copyright © 2000 Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.