The “Caret” Top: A powerful way to search Entelo

October 3, 2012 at 3:38 PM by Jon Bischke

One of the things we're very excited about with Entelo is all the little hidden things that people are learning on their way to becoming Entelo power users. One of those things is a very powerful search tool referred to as the "caret" which is represented as the ^ symbol.

What the caret allows you to do is to "boost" certain search terms in your string. For example, let's say you're looking for someone who knows both Ruby and Javascript. They're both important but Ruby expertise is significantly more important than Javascript (for whatever reason). First let's look at a regular search query:

Ruby Javascript within 50 miles of San Francisco, CA

 

 

 

 

 

This is a query that looks for the presence of both Ruby and Javascript (just like Google, if you don't specific an operator, the system assume it's an "AND" search).

Now let's run the same search with the caret and assign a weight of 10 to Ruby. So now our query looks like the following:

Ruby^10 Javascript within 50 miles of San Francisco, CA

 

 

 

 
 

This is a search that weights Ruby higher than Javascript. The presence of Javascript is still factored in, just not as much as Ruby is. What you can see here is that while the search results are similar (the top two people are the same), they aren't identical (the third person in the results changes). In many cases, adding the caret will change search results significantly depending on the query.

The number that you assign to the caret is a bit arbitrary so try assigning different numbers and see how this changes your results. This is a great technique to use if you find that you're getting people who are close to the types you're looking for but not quite right. For example, maybe you're looking for front-end engineers and you're getting too many web designers. You can emphasize terms that are more specific to front-end engineers while still retaining terms more commonly associated with web designers.

I hope this made sense and helps you a bit as you search. If you have any questions, please add them in the comments.

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