Help

See also help by example below.

How to conduct quick searches

• Enter the search terms in the text box.
• Use double-quotes to surround phrases, otherwise the words are treated as a list of alternative words.
• Join search terms together using a Boolean "and/or" operator.
• Press the "Submit query" button.

How to prepare custom searches

You can use a powerful query language to concisely specify your query.

Use round brackets and the Boolean operators: AND, OR, ANDNOT, NEAR as in the following examples:

• (directory OR catalogue) AND library

The search can also be contrained to certain fields within the documents:

• TITLE/bird

What is meant by "Full Text"

Every word in every document has been indexed, as well as the text in certain fields. "FullText" means "search for the term anywhere in any text of the document, even in hidden text such as behind the hypertext anchors of URLs".

Join terms with Boolean operators

Combining two search terms into one logical query is done using the operators AND, OR, ANDNOT, NEAR.

AND

The query "solar AND energy" will find only documents that contain both words.

OR

The query "solar OR wind" will find only documents that contain either word (as well as both words).

ANDNOT

The query "solar ANDNOT wind" will find only documents that contain the word "solar" but do not contain the word "wind". ANDNOT is the complement of AND.

NEAR

This means "find search term #1 within 50 characters of search term #2".

Text terms

A "word" consists of a group of non-blank characters, e.g. solar

A "word list" consists of two or more words separated by blanks. A Boolean OR is implied between words in the word list, e.g. solar alternative natural will find documents that contain at least one of those words.

A "phrase" consists of a word list enclosed in double-quotes. The value to be searched for is exactly the word order that appears in the phrase, e.g. "passive solar"

Phrase searching

To search for a phrase, enclose the term in double quotes ...

• "passive solar" means "find these two words occurring adjacent to each other and in the specified order".

If the quotes are omitted then the query terms will be treated as a word list.

Case insensitive

Searching is completely case-insensitive ...

• "solar", "Solar", and "SOLAR" are equivalent.

Wildcards and right-truncation

A limited wildcard facility is supported with right-truncation. Append an asterix "*" to the end of a search term to match any word that begins with the given prefix. Use the wildcard to search for all plural and singular forms of a word. This is also useful if you are not sure how to spell the end of a word.

Use as many known characters in the term as possible to get a more accurate search. The use of wildcards does cause a slower search.

• heat* will match "heat, heating, heater, heated"
• window* will match "window, windows"

Ranking of results

The search results are scored and then ranked according to their relevancy within the set of results.

A document that contains more instances of high-scoring search terms will get ranked higher. What makes a search term "high-scoring"? Basically, the fewer documents the term occurs in, the more important it must be. If many instances of the term occur in a particular document, then that document will be ranked higher, especially if it is a short document.

Common words are excluded from the query

Certain very common words are discarded from the query. These "stop words" such as: it, these, and, or, a, also, two will have no effect. Here is the complete current list of 400 stop words.

Help by example