Expand The Expand option, located in the Search Window, is designed to aid you in finding information which may not be easily retrieved by standard searching. The Expand option assists in searching for issues over which you do not have complete understanding. The Expand option displays a list of words that are related to the word, words, or document identified for further analysis in the Expand option. The Expand option is a statistically generated, extended thesaurus. To activate the Expand Search capability, place the text (one or more words, paragraphs, documents, ID #s) in the Search Window, then move your mouse pointer to the Expand Button and click. This action will automatically open a window displaying the word "Expanding." After a short period of time, the window will normally fill with an array of terms identified as related in some way to the original text. The words are displayed in priority order from left to right across a row of words and then down to the next row. The number of words displayed by Expand will normally correspond to the size of the Expand Window. You may resize this window at any time to control the number of words to be displayed. The list of words produced by the Expand can be used in several ways. These words can improve the recall of topically related documents by suggesting alternative terms that may be appropriate to use in retrieving relevant documents. Additionally, the Expand terms can also help to identify subtopics of particular interest. The Expand option has some limitations when used with a small database such as those found on Windows Personal Librarian. Since Expand is a statistical operation, its usefulness and accuracy depends, in part, on the amount of material in the database specifically related to the topic of interest. With very small databases, there will be a significant occurrence of noise words, i.e., words that scored well but are not particularly related to the desired topic. The larger the amount of material in a database on a given topic, the fewer the number of noise words.