Help for Simple Web Search (Part 1)
What happens when you perform a search?
When you search for a term such as "astronomy" you are searching for documents where the word "astronomy" occurs. If it is a text document you are looking for, then you will get a hit on the occurrence of "astronomy" in the text.
What is unique about UiO's search service?
No two search services are alike. This means that you will probably have to learn some new tricks to exploit the opportunities offered by UiO's search service. There are two principles you must bear in mind for searches at UiO:
- UiO's search service offers so-called AND searches. This means that if you type in two words separated by a space, you will only find pages than contain both these words.
- Please note that truncation symbols such as * or ? cannot be used for web page searches at UiO. Certain word stemming principles are used for UiO's web page searches. This means that you will also get hits on "healthy" and "healthful" if you search for the term "health" without any truncation symbol.
How to find a document easily?
There are many ways of performing a search. Some examples are given below to help you get started.
Example 1:If you want to find documents containing the term health in hope that you will find something interesting to read:
Example 2: You want to find documents containing the term health and the term disease. Use both terms in your search to get hits on documents containing both terms:
Example 3: You notice that documents dealing with economics and not just the field of health and disease appear on the result page. You decide therefore to perform a new search where the term economics should not occur. You do this by using a minus sign - in front of the term economics: -economics:
Example 4: You want to know more about mental health and assume that a search for the phrase mental health will give the desired result. To search for a phrase, enclose it within double quotation marks:
If you performed the search without quotation marks, you would find documents where both the terms occurred independently of each other in addition to the actual phrase.
This was a brief introduction to some of the methods that are available for finding what you are looking for. There are of course more methods, and you will find these on our next help page.