This function works even when the example document is very large. The set of documents is often selected from a previous query. This function is especially useful when a statistical query searches over the results of an earlier boolean query, or visa-versa. ConQuest can fmd documents which contain numbers or dates within a specified range. Numbers are subject to the standard proximity tests in the boolean and natural language queries, just like other words.
Users can target searches to occur only over a single category, or over multiple categories.
In comparing ConQuest to other systems, we found the following two graphs to be useful. The results show that ConQuest was best on five of the 39 queries, worst on one query, and well above average for most. EssentiallY, the area above average is much greater than the area below. This chart was originally produced in the TREC proceedings. We suspect that the performance in this region is enhanced by our aggressive expansion of terms coupled with the flexible ranking algorithm.