SortFix Powered Search Blog

Many people have asked me about SortFix’s Power Words feature. I realized that although most people understand very well that the Power Words are those words related to the search, and should be added to the search query. Only a few grasped the idea that Power Words can be used as a negative filter.
Therefore, in this post, I’ve decided to elaborate about the power of our Power Words.

SortFix Power Words

Here at SortFix we believe that the user is the only one who knows exactly what he is searching for. Users have a hard time describing what they are looking for because in many cases they themselves are unfamiliar with a particular field.
Moreover, formulating a search query is not as simple as you think. It is a complex cognitive task to describe a specific subject using just a few words without including other subjects (either closely or distantly related).

Why is it such a cognitively complex task?  Take this example:
Think about the word “box” and the various meanings you can attach to it. A “box” may be related to sports (“boxing”), film (“box office”), music (“music box”), office supplies (“shipping boxes”), and so on.
Each type of “box” has a different meaning, so my search results are wide ranging. Many of these results will not even be related to my primary intention. No one can predict which words should be included or excluded in any of these searches.
Including and excluding words is crucial for successful, effective searches. Unrelated subjects clutter the results and may prevent access to relevant ones. Searchers cannot predict which results may or may not be related to their search query and intention. This is the reason SortFix analyzes the search results according to the users’ search query and generates Power Words.
The SortFix Power Words generator calculates the “related/unrelated terms” to be optimized for optimal results excluding and/or optimal search query differentiae description to optimize results filtering and retrieval.

So Power Words give users the power to describe their search needs, suggest additional ways to describe it, and even highlight terms and subjects that should be excluded from the search. With this power at hand (combined with the SortFix intuitive Search User Interface), users can semantically tell the search engine what they need and therefore receive only and exactly what they are searching for.

SortFix search for Box using Power Words

In my upcoming posts, I will elaborate on the importance of SortFix’s Add to Search and Remove features when used with Power Words.

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