How does THOMAS search data? What sort of results can I expect to see from a search?
Searching for items in THOMAS, whether legislation or the Congressional Record, is accomplished by a “relevancy-ranking” retrieval system called InQuery. In general, this type of system allows you to cast a wide net for items. When you perform a word/phrase search, InQuery assigns a “weight” to each document that contains one or more of the words given to establish its relevancy to your search. It then presents the results of the search in a relevancy-ranked order; the first document being the most “relevant.” You may find it necessary to vary the word/phrase of your search to change or improve the set of results. InQuery matches the actual words in your search with the actual words in the text. Thus, if you execute a search on “death penalty,” you will not get documents that use the alternate term “capital punishment.” View more information about the InQuery search system.
