• Searching Guide
  • Introductory guide to searching

    When you run a search, the keywords you enter are split into a series of 'terms' and 'operators'. A term might be a single word - policy or procedure, or it maybe a phrase, indicated by wrapping double quotes - "policy procedure". A quoted search like this will search for all words matching the exact order you provide.

    Operators allow you to customise the search - the available options are explained below.

    Field Names

    When running a standard search, all fields are searched using the search terms you provide. Using a Field Name operator, you can choose specific fields and values to search for:


    Wildcards

    Wildcard searches can be run on individual terms, using ? to replace a single character, and * to replace zero or more characters:

    pol?cy pro*

    It's important to note that using wildcards can use a significant amount of memory and can perform very badly - you should only use these terms if you're unable to find appropriate results using more standard search terms.

    Allowing a wildcard at the beginning of a word (eg "*ing") is particularly cumbersome, because all terms within search need to be examined, just in case they match.

    Fuzziness

    You can search for terms that are similar to, but not exactly like the search terms, using the "fuzzy" operator:

    polciy~ prcedure~

    This will search for similar terms with a maximum of two differences, where a difference can be an insertion, deletion or substitution.

    The default edit distance is 2, but an edit distance of 1 is normally sufficient to catch 80% of all misspellings. You can specify this as:

    polciy~1