Advanced Search Techniques

The Online Catalog search facility interfaces with the SWISH 1.1.1 indexing system. SWISH offers a few techniques to expand and refine your search queries. These techniques make use of the keywords and, or, and not.

You can use the booleans and, or, or not in your search query. Without these booleans, the default will be to and your search words together. Evaluation takes place from left to right only, although you can use parentheses to force the order of evaluation.

Here are a few examples:

  example 1: john and doe or jane
  example 2: john and (doe or not jane)
  example 3: not (john or jane) and doe

1. This search evaluates the expression from left to right.
2. This search will also be evaluated from left to right, although the operation in parentheses will be evaluated as a whole first.
3. john or jane will be evaluated first, a not operation will be performed on that, then everything will be and'ed with doe.

Your search query will automatically be expanded to included all words that begin with your search query words. For example, a search for "geo" would match to geography, geology, george, and others.