Quick Search, available in the left column of the Titles List page, enables you to select books based on title, author, subject, publisher or ISBN.
Full Text Search is available both from the Menu Bar and in the Title Display window. Search from the Menu Bar searches across all titles. In the Title Display window, selecting the Search tab in the left hand panel allows you to search the title that is open. Selecting the Search All enables you to search across all titles in the Electric Book collections.
Using Search All in the Title Display window, will first display a list of titles in which your search term is found. Clicking on any title will display the synopses of each searchterm instance in that title. You can toggle between Titles found and Search Results by clicking on each element in the title bar.
Most searches can be performed using the options in the search forms. Using the drop down selections you can search for an exact match for your phrase or for all or any of the words in the entry. If you want a proximity search, enter the words and then choose the "within 5 words" or "within 20 words" options.
For example: Treasure Island and Exact Match will find only the phrase "Treasure Island" Treasure island and All words will find titles containing both "treasure" and "island" Treasure Island and Any words will find titles containing "treasure" or "island" or both Treasure Island and within 5 words will find any instances of "treasure" occurring within 5 words of "island"
If you want a field search on title, author or subject, select the field from the drop down options and enter the text you want to search for. You can use field search on its own or in conjunction with any full text search.
Word stem is on as default and means that a search will find derivatives of the term entered. For example a search for "talk" will also find "talking", "talked" and "talks".
Selecting Fuzzy Search will allow you to search for words which have variant spellings or may have been misspelled. This is particularly useful where words have been transliterated from non-Latin alphabets.
More Search Features
The search engine used is very sophisticated. If you consider that the preset options cannot give you exactly the search functions you require, you can construct your own. Details of how you can use the more advanced options can be found below. Construct your search term, enter it in the box and click on the Search button.
A full-text search is performed using what is called a boolean 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:
If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, Treasure and Island or Adventure could mean (Treasure and Island) or Adventure, or it could mean Treasure and (Island or Adventure).
Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.
Search terms may include the following special characters:
Punctuation inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t. 1843(c)(8)(ii) would become 1843 c 8 ii (four words).
gol* would match gold, goldmine, etc.
*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.
dis? would match dish and disk but not dishes.
ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.
Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.
The effect of a synonym search depends on the type of synonym expansion requested on the search form. full-text Search can expand synonyms using only user-defined synonym sets, using synonyms from full-text Search's built-in thesaurus, or using synonyms and related words (such as antonyms, related categories, etc.) from full-text Search's built-in thesaurus.
To ask full-text Search to search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Examples: #smith, #johnson
You can also check the Phonic searching box in the search form to enable phonic searching for all words in your search request. Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching and tends to make searches over-inclusive, so it is usually better to use the # symbol to do phonic searches selectively.
(apple or banana) and (vine w/5 grape) would retrieve any document that (1) contained either apple OR banana, AND (2) contained vine within 5 words of grape.
(apple w/5 pie) w/10 banana
(apple and pie) w/10 banana
(apple w/10 banana) w/10 (vine and grape)
(apple and banana) w/10 orange tree
If NOT is not the first connector in a request, you need to use either AND or OR with NOT:
not (apple w/5 sauce)
Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).
For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers). Using alphabet customization, the interpretation of punctuation characters can be changed. For example, if you change the comma and period from space to ignore, then 123,456.78 would be interpreted as 12345678.
