What do you mean No Matches?

Answer 1

A match

"A match" in this question means item #1 is exactly the same or very similar to item #2 (or to multiple items). The easiest way to understand "a match" versus "no matches" is to recall the childhood game in which you turn over cards in 3 rows, with say 5 cards to a row. You then turn over one card and pick a second card-- if they match, you get ahead. If they don't match, you turn both cards over and start again until you turn over two separate cards that match. This is called a "memory matching" card game.

No matches

"No matches" means that nothing is exactly the same or very similar to the question you have asked.

The matching process

The "matching" process is used by many "search" functions, online and off-line. Off-line, the best example is a library with the old card catalogue drawers with index cards for each book. Mentally, we know what subject we want and we visually search for close matches. You might search for "Civil War" and then have to manually decide what "fits" your search and what doesn't. Online, the big difference between the "memory matching card game" is that we cannot use our own judgment online as to what matches UNTIL after we see what is available. Comparing online to the library example, we can see what is in the library index but we have to do a lot of manual and mental sorting. But online, to make this easier, programmers write special programs to help us find good matches without having to spend time weeding through bad matches. BUT to be successful searchers online, we must be able to use words that narrow down the item or topic we want. For example, if I only type in "Civil War" when I actually want to find text about "Union Soldiers+Civil War", then I might get billions of "Civil War" webpages but have a tough time wading through all the results just to find the "Union Soldiers" documents/webpages.

Online Examples

1. Google uses "matches" (plus how they rank webpages) to give the best matches in the results. If you enter the search words as "dog food", Google will not show you "Atlantic Ocean", for example.

2. Any website that uses "on site" search boxes such as Google-OnSite or Freefind or Pico (all free search engines for websites) will give you "close matches" to whatever you searched for on that website.

3. Major companies or shopping websites use an internal onsite search engine. If you visited a website that sells pottery and you asked for "Native American pottery", it wouldn't show you "Canadian Artists" (unless the web designers did not properly code their webpages).

Tips to find "(good) Matches" and to avoid "No Matches"

• review how to do a library search - you'll use many of the same skills online
• "play" at searches so you learn how search engines "see" the words you enter. One interesting way to play is to enter common words and look at the number of results. For example, go to Google and type in "the" -- just the. The results will be enormous! Now, try "Home Page" or "My Page"-- again, huge results because it is used so frequently by so many people. Now, try "Zelienople PA" (yes, it is a real place!)-- you'll see it has just under 600,000 results. That's far less than the search for "the". It's very difficult to find a word or phrase that has extremely low results, unless it is an obscure topic!
• think of words that say exactly what you want
• narrow down the subject - instead of "celebrities", use the person's name or celebrity+person's name
• learn to use the built in definers like the plus sign or minus sign (plus means "include this" and minus means "exclude this")
• if you get billions of results, continue to narrow down the subject
• try different words or reverse the words
• learn how webmasters write webpages so you'll learn about "keywords"
• if you want a magazine, use that word in front of the topic, such as "magazine+cats"
• if you want professional journal articles, use "journal+the subject you want", like "journal+insomnia"
• if you want to learn grammar rules, say for "how to use commas", enter "grammar+commas"
• The more you search, the better you will get at finding the results you want.