|
|
|
|
|
There are 7 ways to find information in this collection:
From the search page, you make a query in these simple steps:
When you make a query, the titles of twenty matching documents will be shown. There is a button at the end to take you on to the next twenty documents. From there you will find buttons to take you on to the third twenty or back to the first twenty, and so on. Click the title of any document, or the little button beside it, to see it.
A maximum of 100 is imposed on the number of documents returned. You can change this number by clicking the PREFERENCES button at the top of the page.
Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words or phrases called "search terms." A term is a single word containing only letters and digits, or a phrase consisting of a sequence of words enclosed in double quotes ("..."). Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include punctuation.
For example, the query
will be treated the same as
For collections built with MGPP a few other options are available.
There are two different kinds of query.
Use as many search terms as you like--a whole sentence, or even a whole paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.
In most collections you are given a choice of different indexes to search. For example, there might be author or title indexes. Or there might be chapter or paragraph indexes. Generally, the full matching document is returned regardless of which index you search.
If documents are books, they will be opened at the appropriate place.
If you have selected advanced query mode (in preferences) you have slightly different search options. Advanced searches in MGPP collections use boolean operators. A boolean search allows you to combine terms using & (for "and"), | (for "or"), and ! (for "not"), using parentheses for grouping if desired. The default operator is | (for "or").
For example, snail & farming will match documents which contain both snail AND farming, whereas snail | farming will match documents that contain either snail OR farming. snail !farming will match documents that contain snail AND DO NOT contain farming.
More precise queries can be specified using combinations of operators and parentheses. For example, (sheep | cattle) & (farm | station), or sheep | cattle | goat !pig.
The results can be displayed in ranked order, as described for the some search in Query type, or in "natural" (or "build") order. This is the order that documents were processed during the creation of the collection.
Further operators include NEARx and WITHINx.
NEARx is used to specify the maximum distance apart (x words) two query
terms must be for a document to match.
WITHINx specifies that the second term must occur within x words after the first term. This is similar to NEAR but the order is important. The default distance is 20.
When you click the Preferences link at the bottom of the page you will be able to change some features of the interface to suit your own requirements.
You can switch to an "advanced" query mode which allows you to combine terms using & (for "and"), | (for "or"), and ! (for "not"), using parentheses for grouping if desired. This allows you to specify more precise queries.
You can switch the search type of the collection between "normal" search, and "fielded" search.
A pair of buttons controls whether upper and lower case must match when searching. For example, if "ignore case differences" is selected, snail farming will be treated the same as Snail Farming and SNAIL FARMING.
A pair of buttons controls whether to ignore word endings or not when searching. For example, if "ignore word endings" is selected, snail farming will be treated the same as snails farm and snail farmer. This currently only works properly for English language text. It may be more convenient and precise to use the search term truncation facility described above in "Search terms".
A pair of buttons controls whether accented and unaccented letters must match when searching. For example, if "ignore accents" is selected, fédération will be treated the same as fedération and federation.
You can turn on the search history feature, which shows you your last few queries. This makes it easy to repeat slightly modified versions of previous queries.
Finally, you can control the number of hits returned, and the number presented on each screenful.