Search
Tips
Basic
searching
A single term search involves a single word
such as "geology"
or "patent"
(without the quotation marks).
A
phrase search is a group of words surrounded by
double quotes such as "Trenton
River".
A
little more advanced searching
Sometimes
you will have a good idea of what your searching
for. Articles from a specific year in a specific
publication for instance. It's very easy to combine
searches in the multiple fields provided. For instance,
searching for all articles in the 2001 AAPG Bulletin
and SEPM's JSR can be accomplished by checking
ONLY the Bulletin and JSR collections
and typing 2005
in BOTH of the year fields. Press the Search button
and your results will be limited to those collections
and the specified period of time.
Other
times you might have a situation where there are
specific concepts in a document but aren't part
of a phrase. That is where the AND operator becomes
useful. Such as a search for sedimentology
AND delta.
Sifting
OUT material
oYou may run into situations where you are getting
material you don't want. The NOT operator is really
useful. In the title field, searching Bulletin articles
it's handy to type in Calgary
NOT abstract.
That will sift out all the Calgary meeting abstracts.
WILDCARDS
.Two
wildcards are useful on this site:
The
? operator acts as a single character wildcard.
M?d
will match words like Mud, Mad, Med, Mod, Mid and
so on.
The
* operator acts as a multiple character wildcard.
Petrol*m
will match Petroleum and so on.
Fuzzy
Searches
This site supports fuzzy searches based on the
Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm.
To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~",
symbol at the end of a Single word Term. For example
to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam"
use the fuzzy search.
roam~
will find word such as foam and roams.
An
additional (optional) parameter can specify the
required similarity. The value is between 0 and
1 (if not specified 0.5 is used), with a value closer
to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be
matched. For example roam~0.8
Proximity
Searches
This site supports finding words that are a
within a specific distance away. To do a proximity
search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the
end of a Phrase. For example to search for a "petroleum"
and "geology" within 10 words of each
other in a document use the search: "Petroleum
Geology" ~10
Other
Booleans
The "+" operator also called the required
operator requires that the term after the "+"
symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single
document. So, to search for documents that must
contain "Calgary" and may contain "meeting"
use the query: +Calgary
meeting
There
are additional sophisticated search methods available
and we will be adding them to this document very
soon.
This
page is copyright © 2005, Datapages, Inc.
Revised:
4/24/08
