Web Search (WS) Help

I. Basic vs. Advanced Search

Basic Search searches for all of the terms entered in the search box in the title, fulltext and various properties fields of a document stored in the WS repository.

Advanced Search allows you to specify which parts of the documents in the WS repository are searched. You may limit your search by Title, Languageor Date Rangefields, combine search fields, and change the sort order of your results from the Advanced Search screen.

II. General observations

1. Punctuation and Capitalization

Generally, WS ignores punctuation, accented characters and capitalization.

Exceptions to this are the wildcard characters (* and ?).

2. Stems and word variations

The search engine will retrieve results which contain variations on the provided search terms, e.g.:

feasibility study will also retrieve documents containing feasible studyor feasibility studies

III. Narrowing your search

You can narrow the scope of your search in a number of ways:

1. Use Boolean Search on the Basic Search screen
2. Use fielded searching on the Advanced Search screen (e.g.: Title, Language)
3. Specify All words or This Phrase searching (rather than Any Word)
4. Limit your search to a specific Date range

1. Boolean Search

Under Basic Search, use boolean operators OR, AND, AND NOT in capital letters. For example, International AND NOT monetary.

2. Fielded Searching

In Advanced Search, you can limit your search to a specific field, or you can combine different fields in your search, e.g.:

Find only documents where the words fiscal and planning appear anywhere in the document (enter terms in the first box) and the phrase reducing debt appears in the Title.

3. All words or Phrase searching

Specify All words or This Phrase searching to reduce the number of results retrieved

• All words searching will only retrieve documents where every search term you have provided appears in the document.

• This Phrasesearching will retrieve only documents where your search terms appear in the document side by side

4. Date Range

Use this feature to retrieve only documents saved within a specified date range (e.g From: 2008-01-15 To: 2008-02-22

IV. Expanding your search

You can expand the scope of your search in a number of ways:

1. Search for your terms in all fields of the document
2. Specify Any word searching
3. Use wildcard characters
4. Specify alternate spellings of a term

1. Search all fields of the document

Enter your search terms in the first search box on the Basic or Advanced Search screen to retrieve documents that contain your search terms in either the title, fulltext or properties fields of documents stored in the WS repository.

2. Any words searching

Specify Any word to retrieve documents containing some or all of your search terms, e.g.

Any word search for occupational health will retrieve any document containing either the word occupational or health or both.

3. Using wildcards in your search query

Both * and ? can function as wildcards in your search query.

The * can be used to represent one or more characters in a search query, e.g.

offic*will retrieve results which contain office, offices, official etc.

The ? represents a single missing character; e.g.

legislat?? will retrieve results which contain legislates or legislatedorlegislator.

4. Specify alternate spellings of a term

Consider searching for alternate spellings for your search terms, e.g.

learning centre or learning center

Note: When zero or very few results are found, WS may provide common spelling variations for the searcher to try. This may be helpful in the case of typos.