Expressions of Suffering - Nordic 2002 Seminar

Document Library Search Tips

When searching for documents, there are several techniques you can use to improve the accuracy of your search results. These terms allow you to formulate partial word, boolean and phrase matching search queries. Below are examples of the query language that is used to perform searches in the document library. You can also combine the techniques below in a single search to further refine your query.

Simple word searches

If you enter multiple words for your search query the results will be documents containing one or more of the words in your query. Queries are not case sensitive, so they will match the word(s) only based on spelling. Documents matching more of the words will appear first in the search results. Because a document only need to match one of the words you specify, you may find that your search results contain irrelevant documents.

Example: housing landlord rent

This search query would find all documents containing one or more of the words specified.

Refining your results to match multiple words

Using the and search term between the words you are searching for will limit the search results only to documents containing all of the specified words.

Example: housing and landlord and rent

This search query would find only documents containing all of the words specified.

Explicitly omitting results

You might also want to omit documents containing certain words. Using the and not search term between the words you are searching for will omit any documents containing the word you specify.

Example: housing and landlord and not descrimination

This search query would find documents containing the first two words and omit any documents also containing the last word.

Searching for phrases

If the word combination you are searching for always occurs in a particular phrase, you will get better search results using a phrase matching query. To match a particular phrase, place it in double quotation marks. In order for a document to match, the words in the phrase must occur in the document in the same order as they appear in the query.

Example: "fair housing"

This search query would find only documents containing the phrase specified.

Matching partial words

You can match multiple word forms simultaneously using partial word matching. If, for instance you want to guarantee that all documents containing any form of a word (plural, singular, past tense, etc.) are found, you can use the asteriks (*) and question mark (?) wildcard characters in your search queries. The question mark matches any single character and the asterik matches zero or more characters.

Example: descriminat*

This query would find documents containing the words "descriminate", "descriminated", "descrimination", etc.