| IUPAC Nomenclature of Organic Chemistry | |||||
How to make queries |
This page describes the process of searching with Swish-e. Here are some suggestions for getting the best results out of the Swish-e search engine.
You can use the Boolean operators and, or, or not in searching. Without these Boolean operators Swish-e will assume you're and'ing the words together. The operators are not case sensitive. These three searches, for example, are the same:
The not operator inverts the results of a search.
Finds all the documents that do not contain the word foo.
Parentheses can be used to group searches.
Returns all documents that have none or one term, but not both.
To search for the words and, or, or not, place them in a double quotes.
Will search for the word "not".
Other examples:
Retrieves files containing either the words "smilla" or "snow".
(same thing)
Retrieves first the files that contain both the words "smilla" and "snow"; then among those the ones that do not contain the word "sense".
The wildcard (*) is available, however it can only be used at the end of a word; otherwise it is considered a normal character (i.e. can be searched for if included in the WordCharacters directive).
This query only retrieves files which contain the given word.
On the other hand:
Retrieves "librarians", "librarianship", etc. along with "librarian".
Note that wildcard searches combined with word stemming can lead to unexpected results. If stemming is enabled, a search term with a wildcard will be stemmed internally before searching. So searching for running* will actually be a search for run*, so running* would find runway. Also, searching for runn* will not find running as you might expect, since running stems to run in the index, and thus runn* will not find run.
In general, the order of evaluation is not important. Internally swish-e processes the search terms from left to right. Parenthesis can be used to group searches together, effectively changing the order of evaluation. For example these three are the same:
But these two are not the same:
The first finds all documents that contain both foo and baz, but do not contain bar. The second finds all that contain foo, and contain either bar or baz, but not both.
It is often helpful in understanding searches to use the Boolean terms and parenthesis. So the above two become:
These four examples are all the same search (assuming that AND is the default search type):
Looking at the first three searches, Swish-e finds all the documents with "juliet". Then it finds all documents that do not contain "ophelia". Those two lists are then combined with the Boolean AND operator resulting with a list of documents that include "juliet" but not "ophelia". Finally, that list is AND'ed with the list of documents that contain "pac".
However it is always possible to force the order of evaluation by using parenthesis. For example:
Retrieves files with "juliet" that do not contain both words "ophelia" and "pac".
To search for a phrase in a document use double-quotes to delimit your search terms.
You can not use Boolean search terms inside a phrase. That is:
Finds documents with both words "this" and "that", but:
Finds documents that have the phrase "this and that". A phrase can consist of a single word, so this is how to search for the words used as Boolean operators:
Finds documents that contain all three words, but in any order.
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