Search help
• Simple search tips
• More advanced search tips
• Quickly finding an article that appeared in print
• Finding an article by a specific writer
• Archive: Finding older articles
• What is DocFinder?
Simple search tips
Just type in a few words or phrases. Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the better results you'll get.
Verizon's VPN strategy
The search engine will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- our search engine returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.
To search for a specific phrase, surround it with double quotation marks. For example,
"Computer Associates"will return links to articles that specifically mention that vendor, as opposed to article that might mention "computers" or "associates."
By default, our search engine queries an article database for the current and previous year, containing articles from Network World and Network World Fusion, along with archives of our e-mail newsletters (forum postings, however, are not included; the Forum has its own search engine). If you want to search our archives back to 1995, use our archive search.
Also by default, our search engine will scan documents across the entire site. A drop-down menu next to the search box lets you narrow the search by selecting a specific channel or topic (for example, you could limit your search to just the Service Provider Networks channel). Many Topics and other resource pages also have even narrower search engines (for example, the LANs page lets you search just LANs resources on Network World Fusion).
More advanced search tips
Our Advanced Search page lets you do more complex searches easily by filling out some boxes and making choices via drop-down menus. What follows are instructions for power users who like to build their own queries.
You can force the search engine to return only documents that mention specific words or phrases by putting a plus sign in front of the word or phrase. For example:
+Novell +"Chris Stone"will only give you links to articles that specifically mention both Novell and Chris Stone. You can exclude words or phrases with a minus sign, for example:
+Novell -"Chris Stone"
The search engine is case sensitive by default. If you're unsure about whether a word or phrase is capitalized, typing it in lower case will force the search engine into case insensitivity, mcnealy will match McNealy.
Quickly finding an article that appeared in print
You can find a specific article by combining all or part of the headline with the title: attribute, like this:
title: "IT buyers swap price-cutting tips"
Finding an article by a specific author
Use the author: attribute and, where appropriate, double quotation marks and + or - signs. For example:
+author:"Jim Duffy" +cisco -nortelwill bring up all articles by Jim Duffy that mention Cisco but not Nortel.
Archive: Finding older articles
Our default search engine currently finds documents from 2002 and 2003. We also have an archive of articles from 1995 through 2001, accessible here.
What is DocFinder?
DocFinder is our system to get readers of the print edition of Network World more information on the stories they've read. Many Network World articles have one or more DocFinder numbers associated with them. Type one of these numbers into the DocFinder/Search box and you'll be taken to the relevant article or resource.
