Advanced Search
Interface
In the upper part of the Advanced Search screen, the tick boxes allow you to restrict your search to one or more particular products, depending on the subscription(s) that you have.
In the lower part of the screen, you can select the following search parameters:
field: select the search field in which you want to search; default, this is “full text”
character set: here you can choose to input Greek or Cyrillic characters; a virtual keyboard will appear
search term: key in your search term(s) here; tips are presented at the left hand side
operator: in case you use more than one search term, you can combine these with OPTIONAL, REQUIRED and EXCLUDE,
which are equivalent to OR, AND and NOT.
General
Unless you have very specific requirements, it is often best simply to type short search queries; often one or two words may be all you need. By default, if you search for two or more words, the search engine will look for all of the words you enter, ie will treat the query as a Boolean AND.
The search is also insensitive to case: searching for abraham, ABRAHAM or ABraHaM will all retrieve the same results.
Furthermore, the search engine will also search for words with the same stem, ie a search for bow will also retrieve bowing, bowed and bows.
Search ranking
When it compiles the result list, the search engine returns results in the following order of priority:
Exact matches in the article heading
Partial matches in the article heading
Matches of all terms in the full text of the article
Special characters
If you want to query terms that include accented characters in the Latin alphabet you do not need to use accents. For example, a search for allah will match Allāh. Alternatively, if you copy text with accents (say, from an article in Brill Online) and paste it into the search box, that will also retrieve the correct results.
Numbers
The seach engine normally neglects numbers in search strings. If you want to find articles with the Quran sura and verse 1:1, key in "1:1" in the search field, including the double qoutes.
Tips and tricks
Phrases
If you type more than one word in the search box, the search engine will retrieve all articles that contain all the terms, wherever they appear in the article. If you want more precision and just want to search for the exact phrase, you must include the phrase in double quotes, eg "arabic script".
Wildcards
The search engine allows you to modify your search term in a number of ways. Some of the most commonly used are the wildcards.
You can use the "?" symbol to perform a single character wildcard search; or you can use the "*" symbol for zero or more characters.
For example, jo? will match job and joy. The term jo* will also match jonah, john and journey.
Neither operator can be used as the first character of a term.
Fuzzy searches (pattern matches)
A fuzzy search is useful if you are not sure how to spell a particular word, or if alternative spellings are permissible. To perform a fuzzy search, simply add the "~" character to the end of the search term.
For example, grammer~ will match grammar, and Jeddah~ will match Jedda.
Proximity searches
You can find words that are near each other using the "~" character at the end of a phrase.
For example, the query "adam eve"~3 will match the two terms within 3 words of each other.
Boolean operators
The search engine supports AND, OR and NOT as Boolean operators, all of which must be typed in upper case.
The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document.
The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document.
The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT.
Combining and grouping
The use of brackets allows you to group terms, and achieve greater complexity in the construction of your query.