Contents:
At its simplest, the simple search functionality allows you to enter any words
in the query box, hit Search, and see results.
Options
See also: Further Search Options
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The detailed search allows you to focus your search by country or topic
keywords, by title or freetext keyword, or a combination of them. If
information is entered in more than one box, then it will be and-ed. I.e, if
you put Russia in the countries box and oil in the topics box, your search
results will be on items about Russian oil.
Further Search Options
Boolean Options
These can be used anywhere in the query field in Simple Search and Advanced Search, and the Countries, Topics, Titling and Freetext fields of Detailed Search. A term is a search unit, like a word or a phrase.
- Terms can be ANDED together, e.g. "interest rates" AND bank in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain both the phrase "interest rates" and the word bank.
- If you don't use AND to link them, then they will be assumed to be OR-ed together, e.g. "interest rates" bank in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain either the phrase "interest rates" or the word bank or both.
- Excluding terms: if you use NOT to link terms, then documents will be found matching one but not another, e.g. in the Country field of Detailed Search, entering United Kingdom NOT United States will find articles keyworded United Kingdom but not keyworded United States.
- Brackets may be used to group Boolean terms, e.g. ("interest rates" bank) NOT "Federal Reserve" in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain either the phrase "interest rates" or the word bank, but do not contain the phrase Federal Reserve.
- Simple Search and Advanced Search only: if you are returning results by relevance, you may boost the importance of a particular term or terms in the search. For example, "Bank of England"^4 "United Kingdom" economy in Simple Search while choosing Sort by Relevance will give extra priority to the results containing Bank of England.
Text Search Options
In open text fields, such as the query field in Simple Search, the titling and freetext fields in Detailed Search, and throughout in Advanced Search, you may use the following advanced text options to be more selective about what you match.
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Use quote marks (") to search for phrases, e.g. "interest rates".
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Wildcarding: ? represents any single character, * 1 or more characters. Note
that our search engine supports stemming, so there is no need to do econom* to
find both economy and economic. E.g. Col?mbia
would find both Colombia and Columbia in free text.
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Proximity searching: the tilde character (~) can be used to find words within a
set distance of each other. To find economic within 10 words of policy, you
would use: "economic policy"~10. Note that the quotes are obligatory,
the syntax is "word1 word2"~how near they must be.
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Most typical searches can be
easily constructed using Detailed Search, and complex email alerting profiles can be built
using multiple saved searches.
Only the most specific of queries therefore will need to
use Advanced Search. All the options excepting the query field are the same as for Simple
Search. The only real difference is that the query field allows you to match across the different fields we use to index our documents. So every term you enter in Advanced Search must specify a field to search in, followed by a colon, followed by the search term.
An example: to find documents matching either a topic or a country keyword, in this case either oil or OPEC, you would use this syntax: country:OPEC topic:oil. Here are some other examples:
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on oil or Iraq or Saudi Arabia
- country:Iraq country:Saudi Arabia topic:oil
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with Shell in the body text and oil in the titling or topic keywords
- textcontent:Shell AND (titling:oil topic:oil)
-
with economy as a topic keyword, and with interest rates in the titling, and
with United Kingdom as a country keyword or Bank of England anywhere in the
text - topic:economy AND titling:"interest rates" AND (textcontent:"Bank of
England" country:United Kingdom)
Here is a complete list of the fields that may be used for searching in Advanced Search
- country: as per Detailed Search's Country field
- topic: as per Detailed Search's Topic field
- titling: as per Detailed Search's Titling field
- textcontent: as per Detailed Search's Freetext field
- headline: specifically searches only the headline
- isfree: whether a document is restricted to clients only, in which case isfree will have the value "false", or fully available more widely, in which case isfree will have the value true.
See also: Further Search Options
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