HOW TO SEARCH THE WEB SITE

There are two ways to search the Northern Funds site: (1) a Simple Search form; and (2) an Advanced Search form.

1) Simple Search
	The Simple Search appears as a search field. You will usually see this at the top right of each page in the Northern Funds site. It allows you quick access to the search function. Note: The search forms given below are "live." If you enter keywords into them and click on "Search," you will perform a live search.    y n
2) Advanced Search
	The Advanced Search looks much like the Simple Search with the addition of several more fields that allow you to put more constraints on the search and specify the number of search results to be returned. If you only use the field with all of the words, then the results you will get will be identical to using the Simple Search. 0 The Advanced Search form allows you to constrain your search so that: (1) you can request documents that have all of the search keywords (with all of the words); (2) you can request that documents contain at least one of the search keywords (with at least one of the words); (3) you can request that documents contain an exact phrase (with the exact phrase); and (4) you can request that documents not contain certain search keywords. Additionally you can constrain the search to a category of information within this site by selecting an option from the "Search by Category" drop-down. The default is the first item, "All of Northern Trust." If you fill in information for one or more of these four constraints, then Advanced Search will find documents that satisfy all your constraints simultaneously.

SEARCH TIPS

Arranging the Search Results by Category

There is a "Search by Category" panel on the left side of the search results screen. An example of one is:

Your search results will be initially in one list ordered by "relevance," with the most relevant results at the top. Unless you constrained your search results with Advanced Search to just one category, it is likely that your search results will come from various areas within the Northern Funds site. Each search result will have a small annotation at the end of its description telling you the area or category. These categories include Personal Finance, Institutional U.S., Institutional International, Resources, and About Us. You can use the panel at the left to rearrange your search results to display just one particular category. The number in parenthesis indicates the number of particular search results in this display in each category. If you click on "All of Northern Trust," your original list will be redisplayed.

Navigating Your Way Around

Your search results will have a header and footer line:

When you click on one of your search results, your browser will jump to that document. If you want to bounce back and forth between your search results and the various documents, right click on the link and use the "Open in a new window" option.

A Bit About How Search Works

With the exception of the "with the exact phrase" option, when you type in a set of search keywords, Search will reduce each "word" to its "stem." For example, all the words "working", "worked" and "worker" have a stem of "work". So, if your search phrase is "working", any document which has one or more words that have a stem of "work" will be selected.

In Simple Search, keywords you type in, after being stemmed, will cause Search to find documents containing ALL of the search keywords.

In Advanced Search, Search will find documents that satisfy ALL of the constraints. Remember that stemming will be done on all search keywords except for the "with the exact phrase" area.

Try to be specific as possible in your search query.

The Order of Returned Documents

You will note that documents in the results lines are numbered. The first document in the list, with number 1, is deemed to be the most relevant document with respect to your query. Document number 2, a bit less relevant; and so on.

In looking at documents, in addition to the raw text of a document, documents have some special categories of information marked inside of them. These include the document's title, its "description" and the set of "keywords" that describe the document. If your query matches a document's title, description or keywords, then it is considered to be more relevant (than some other documents that do not). This is one of the ways that a particular document makes it "to the top of the list." Search also uses other scanning techniques to move a document towards the top of the results list. Some examples of these techniques include the number of times a search query (stem) occurs in a document; and the "importance" of certain search keywords. (For example, using the word "the" or "or" or "but" will cause them to be ignored.)

The Site Map

The "Site Map" link at the top of the Advanced Search form is an alternative way of looking at the Northern Trust site. It presents the hierarchy of this site in outline view. Depending on how you like to search for information, the Site Map page may be very useful in helping you find what you need quickly. Please try it out. Search always remains available, even on the Site Map.

Suggested Pages

At times you will see one or more suggested links that preceed your search results. These will be titled as Suggested Pages. These are links to documents which relate in particular to your search query.

Related Topics

You may also see one or more search query terms that preceed your search results. These will be titled as Related Topics. Each one of these are search terms that will provide results that are in some way related to your particular search. If you click on one of them, a new set of search results will be returned for that particular search term.