Tips for searching the Archive

Document specific indentifiers:

Prefixing your search with an identifier can help narrow the scope of your search.

author:joe would search for documents where the author has the name joe

Identifiers available for use include author, title, description, and contents.

Query Language:

The searching is modeled on standard internet search technologies and should allow the knowledge you already possess to transfer over easily.

A single term is a single word: Forensic or Archive

A phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes "Shunderson Communications"

AND and OR may be used to refine your query

shunderson AND communications or forensic OR archive

In some cases it may be desirable to exclude terms, NOT may be used to accomplish this

shunderson AND NOT communications

Instead of AND or OR; && and || may be used. The examples would translate to

shunderson && communications and forensic || archive

Similarily, NOT can be replaced with !

shunderson && !communications

Wildcard queries are supported through ? and *

? will match a single character (and can be used multiple times)

te?t would match "teat", "tent", "text" and "test"

te?? would match "teat", "tent", "text" and "test" as well as "tear", "tell", "temp" and more

* will match 0 or more characters

te* would match any words beginning with "te" regardless of their length ("technology", "tenant", "tent", "temperature" etc.)

r*r would match any words that begin and end with "r" regardless of their length ("roar", "rotor", "retailer" etc.)

? and * can be combined and/or used any place in a term

*wr?t* would match words such as "write", "wrote", "written", "rewrite" etc.

Advanced Query Language:

Sub queries can be useful for more complex searches. To treat part of a search as a sub query enclose it in parentheses.

shunderson (forensic AND archive) would search for documents containing "shunderson" or documents containing "forensic" and "archive"

Requiring or excluding specific terms or subqueries can be achieved by using the + and - operators

+shunderson communications would search for documents that must contain "shunderson" and may contain "communications"

shunderson +forensic -archive would search for documents that may contain "shunderson", must contain "forensic" and must not contain "archive"

Term modifiers:

Fuzzy Searches are based on the Levenshtein Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde ( ~ ), symbol after a term.

roam~ This search will find terms like foam and roams.

Proximity allows for finding words close together. The terms should be entered as a phrase and followed by the tilde and a number denoting how many words apart the terms may be.

"Shunderson Communications"~10 would search for documents that contain shunderson and communications within 10 words of each other

Boosting allows for increasing the relevance of terms. To boost the relevance of a term use the caret ( ^ ) symbol and a boost factor (number).

Shunderson^6 communications would make the term "shunderson" appear more relevant than "communications"

The boost factor must be greater than 0 and is 1 if unspecified. To make a term less relevant use a boost factor of less than 1

Shunderson^0.2 communications would make the term "shunderson" appear less relevant than "communications"