In Noflail Search, a cooperative response to a query that produces zero-results consists of a list of subqueries of the original query, each paired with the carditinality of its result set. A subquery is a query obtained by removing one or more search terms from the original query; it is therefore more general than the original query. (No cooperative response is produced for a query that has only one term. Also, in order to limit the consumption of back-end resources, no cooperative response is produced for queries that have more than six terms.)

Cooperative responses are available in Advanced Mode. The list of subqueries is shown in a box that appears at the bottom of the Search History panel. It comprises the least general subqueries that produce results, followed by the most general subqueries that do no produce results. The subqueries with results can be used as follow-up queries, while those with no results pinpoint the causes of the failure of the original query.

The user can click on a subquery to copy it to the top of the Search History panel and see its result set in the Results panel. The first page of the result set has already been fetched during the computation of the cooperative response and is memory-resident. It is thus shown in the Results panel with no delay. The user can browse the result sets of several subqueries at once.

Information about the method used to compute the cooperative response can be found in a white paper and a PowerPoint® presentation available in the search technology page of the Pomcor Web site.

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