Search Types

Wildcard Searches

The Marsden Online Archive supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).

  • To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.
    • The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced.
    • Example: s?le (brings back sole and sale)
  • To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.
    • Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters.
    • Example: mission* (brings back missionary, missionaries and missions)
  • You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term.
    • Example: s*e (brings back she, sincere, state, service etc)

Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

Fuzzy Searches

The Marsden Online Archive supports fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm.

  • To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word Term.
    • Example: mission~ (brings back missions, missing, passion, omission)
  • An additional (optional) parameter can specify the required similarity. The value is between 0 and 1, with a value closer to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be matched.
    • Example mission~0.8 (brings back mission, missions and omission)

Note: The default that is used if the parameter is not given is 0.5.

Proximity Searches

The Marsden Online Archive supports finding words are a within a specific distance away.

  • To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Phrase.
    • Example: "Marsden obedient"~10 (this will search "Marsden" and "obedient" within 10 words of each other)

Boosting a Term

  • The Marsden Online Archive provides the relevance level of matching documents based on the terms found.
  • To boost a term use the caret, "^", symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term you are searching. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be.
  • Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a search result by boosting its term.
    • Example: obedient Marsden^4
  • This will make documents with the term Marsden appear more relevant. You can also boost Phrase Terms.
    • Example: "Samuel Marsden"^4 " obedient humble"

Note: By default, the boost factor is 1. Although the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (e.g. 0.2)

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. The Marsden Online Archive supports AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as Boolean operators.

OR

  • The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document.
  • The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR.
    • Example: "Samuel Marsden" OR Marsden

AND (Default)

  • The AND operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two search terms, the AND operator is used, and your results will only include items that contain all of your search terms.
  • The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere within the text of a single document.
  • The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND.
    • Example: " Samuel Marsden " AND " obedient humble"

NOT

  • The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT.
  • The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.
    • Example: "Mrs Kendall" NOT "Thomas Kendall"
  • The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term.
    • Example: NOT "Thomas Kendall"

Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS.

Grouping

  • The Marsden Online Archive supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the Boolean logic for a query.
    • Example: (Samuel OR Marsden) NOT Pratt