Enter one or more bio key words to search: Use Simple Search

Our full-text search engine uses a very simple parser to split text into words. A "word" is any sequence of characters consisting of letters, digits, and "_".

Every correct word in the collection and in the query is weighted according to its significance in the query or collection. This way, a word that is present in many documents will have lower weight (and may even have a zero weight), because it has lower semantic value in this particular collection. Otherwise, if the word is rare, it will receive a higher weight. The weights of the words are then combined to compute the relevance of the row.

Note: the advanced features are activated only when the Simple Search checkbox is OFF (i.e. not checked). When the Simple Search checkbox is ON (the default), the search engine adds a leading plus (+) and a trailing star (*) to each word in your query.

The boolean full-text search capability that is available when Simple Search is OFF supports the following search operators:

+   A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every row returned.

-   A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any row returned.

By default (when neither plus nor minus is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it will be rated higher.

< >   These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The < operator decreases the contribution and the > operator increases it. See the example below.

( )   Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions.

~   A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking noise words. A row that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

*   An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word, not prepended.

"   The phrase, that is enclosed in double quotes ", matches only rows that contain this phrase literally, as it was typed.

And here are some examples:

apple banana 
    find rows that contain at least one of these words. 

+apple +juice 
    ... both words. 

+apple macintosh 
    ... word ``apple'', but rank it higher if it also contain ``macintosh''. 

+apple -macintosh 
    ... word ``apple'' but not ``macintosh''. 

+apple +(>pie <strudel) 
    ... ``apple'' and ``pie'', or ``apple'' and ``strudel'' (in any order),
    but rank ``apple pie'' higher than ``apple strudel''. 

apple* 
    ... ``apple'', ``apples'', ``applesauce'', and ``applet''. 

"some words"
    ... ``some words of wisdom'', but not ``some noise words''. 

If you're having trouble find a person's name that you know is in the database, you need to remember that persons are generally listed by their full legal name. Your friend Ed, for example, is probably listed as either Edwin or Edward. This is another example where using the star (*) will help as you can enter his name as ED* and the program will find all "Ed's" which fit the match criteria. Be sure and enter a last name since there are thousands of "Ed's" in the database and only the first few will be shown.

Names which use an apostrophe like O'Malley, O'Rielly, etc. are probably listed in the database as 'O MALLEY', 'O RIELLY' with a space instead of an apostrophe. You might also want to try leaving the space out as 'OMALLEY', etc.. We don't know why the FCC lists things this way but that's just the way it is. Please don't ask us to change a listing - ask the FCC. There are also some unusual things that the FCC does with last names beginning with DE and/or MAC. When in doubt, try looking for the name by using a space after the prefix - even if the person doesn't really spell their name that way. Again, that's the way the FCC does it - sometimes.

Enter one or more bio key words to search: Use Simple Search