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It's easy to search The Bank of New York Mellon's website. Just type in a few keywords 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. Here are some examples:
Search by typing words and phrases.
Mortgage loans for first-time home buyers in New York
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 -- the search engine returns
relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.
Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with
commas.
"Mortgage loans" for "first time" home buyers in New York
A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those
words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or
proper names with a comma.
Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.
INFORM
The search engine automatically treats adjacent capitalized words as a single
phrase. Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case,
while those in UPPER CASE will only match words that are actually upper case. For example, inform will
find matches for Inform, inform and INFORM whereas a query
for INFORM will only match INFORM.
It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Here
are some effective techniques to try:
Identify a phrase.
| Before: |
checking account |
| After: |
"checking account" |
The Before query is ambiguous. Is it looking for information on
how to check your account balance or opening up a checking account? Identifying "checking account" as a phrase eliminates the
ambiguity. This is the most powerful query refinement technique.
Add a discriminating word or a phrase.
| Before: |
"checking account" |
| After: |
"checking account" interest |
Again, the Before query is ambiguous. Adding
interest makes the query more precise. You'll get
more total matches (because the query is broadened with an additional
term), but the relevance ranking will be better.
Capitalize when appropriate.
| Before: |
depositary receipt unit
investment trust,
government securities clearance |
| After: |
Depositary Receipt, Unit
Investment Trust,
Government Securities Clearance |
These examples, when all lower case, have a variety of possible
interpretations. For example, without capitalization,
unit could refer to an ADR unit and not Unit Investment Trust.
Capitalization reduces the ambiguity. Remember to place a comma between unrelated capitalized
words, since the search engine treats adjacent capitalized words as if they
form a single phrase. It is always a good idea to capitalize proper
names.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-).
| Before: |
foreign |
| After: |
foreign, +exchange -trade |
Using the word foreign alone is ambiguous. Using a "plus" sign before a word tells the search engine
that that
word must appear in the document. Using a "minus" before a word tells the search engine that that word must
not appear in the document.
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