How to Use the Search Engine

Use the forms on the search page to find documents in G&LH containing chosen words or combinations of words. The search engine will return an ordered list of matching documents, with better matches listed first.

The search returns a link to a document containing the word(s) searched for. If the document has a title, it will be shown, otherwise only the document's file name is displayed. A brief explanation of the how the search engine's language works together with some examples of how to use it are given below.

Query Language

The text search engine allows queries to be formed from arbitrary Boolean expressions containing the keywords AND, OR, and NOT (these can also be in lower case as: and, or, not), and grouped with parentheses. For example:

finds documents containing "information" or "retrieval"

information or retrieval
 

as above

information and retrieval
 

finds documents containing both "information" and "retrieval"

information not retrieval
 

finds documents containing "information" but not "retrieval"

(information not retrieval) and WAIS
 

finds documents containing "WAIS", and "information" but not "retrieval"

web*
 

finds documents containing words starting with "web"

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