What is concept searching?

Important - please note that the Advanced Search facility utilises concept search techniques (see below) and returns material from across the site.  However, the General Search will only return "Easy Reads", where available, for Futureskills Scotland reports.

Concept search systems differ from keyword search engines in how they process queries. Keyword systems try to match exactly what you type whereas the Futureskills Scotland concept search engine uses the full query text to perform a statistical relevance calculation. This in turn produces a list of relevant matching documents. The combined statistical effect of terms within a query ensures that "concepts" produce a greater number of relevant documents. The flexibility of the Futureskills Scotland concept search system compensates and accounts for the different ways people will ask a question.

The Futureskills Scotland concept search engine allows you to enter as much information as you want and it is usually true that the longer the query the better the results, so try cutting and pasting a large portion of text into the search box.

The Futureskills Scotland concept search system is based on Bayesian statistical probability engine, the results are scored using a mixture of pattern recognition, word frequency and Claude Shannon's principles.

You can search by asking questions, an example question would be:

"How many people leave school with qualifications"

This matches with a report entitled "The Scottish Labour Market 2002".

In a simple keyword search this result would possibly be returned but would have a low rank because the words "people", "leave" and "qualifications" do not appear exactly in the document. In the concept search the result is more relevant uses the techniques described above.