Tips for full-text searching

Search Requests Overview

The NCGA search engine, dtSearch, supports two types of search requests. A natural language search is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question. After a natural language search, dtSearch sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request.

A boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them. Examples:

apple and pear

Both words must be present

apple or pear

Either word can be present

apple w/5 pear

Apple must occur within 5 words of pear

apple not w/5 pear

Apple must not occur within 5 words of pear

apple and not pear

Only apple must be present

name contains smith

The field name must contain smith

If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Search terms may include the following special characters:

?

Matches any single character. Example: appl? matches apply or apple.

*

Matches any number of characters. Example: appl* matches application

~

Stemming. Example: apply~ matches apply, applies, applied.

%

Fuzzy search. Example: ba%nana matches banana, bananna.

#

Phonic search. Example: #smith matches smith, smythe.

&

Synonym search. Example: fast& matches quick.

~~

Numeric range. Example: 12~~24 matches 18.

:

Variable term weighting. Example: apple:4 w/5 pear:1