Help with Advanced Search
Cambridge Histories Online offers two search options: Quick Search (allowing you to search from any page on the site) and Advanced Search, which gives you the option of constructing a more complex search query.
General Understanding
Search Terms
A search query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases.
A Single Term is a single word such as "biography" or "history".
A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "historical biography".
Multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below for more information on Boolean searching).
'Free' terms (stemming)
The search will try to find exact matches for your search terms, but will also use a 'stemming' algorithm to reduce the various forms of a word to a common root form. For example, the words 'breathe', 'breathes', 'breathing' and 'breathed', via the 'stemmer', reduce to 'breath'. Stemming is applied to both the words in a document and to the search terms that you input for queries.
In practice, this means that if you search for 'breathing', you should find all occurrences of words with the same common root.
Fuzzy Searches
The Cambridge Histories Online search also supports fuzzy searches based on the 'Edit Distance' algorithm. To run a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a single word term. For example, to search for a term similar in spelling to "letter" use the fuzzy search: letter~
This search will find terms like 'letters' and 'letter' and 'later'.
Case Sensitivity
Cambridge Histories Online searches are not case-sensitive. A reference to 'Isaac Newton', for example, would be retuned whether you typed 'isaac newton', 'ISAAC NEWTON' or even 'iSAcc nEwToN'.
Wildcard Searches
The asterisk (*) is a wildcard added to the end of a search term to make sure that all the different endings of that term are found. It represents a group of letters or numbers and can be used in any search field. For example, if you type print* in the search box, any records containing a word beginning with "print" will be returned. These might include: printer, printing, print, and prints. The asterisk wildcard is thus a useful tool in ensuring that you do not miss any relevant records during your search.
The Cambridge Histories Online search supports single and multiple character wildcard searches.
To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.
To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.
The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search: te?t
Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search: test*
You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term: te*t
Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.
Proximity Operators
The Cambridge Histories search supports finding words which are within a specific distance away. To run a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Phrase. For example to search for "women" and "society" within 10 words of each other in a document use the search: "women society"~10
Remember to *include* the double quotes in the search term. This asks the search engine to look for all occurrences of the word "women" which are 10 or less words away from the word "society".
Boosting a Search Term
To boost a search 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 search term will be.
Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a document by boosting its term. For example, if you are searching for 'Shakespearian plays' and you want the term "Shakespeare" to be more relevant boost it using the ^ symbol along with the boost factor next to the term. You would type: Shakespeare^5 plays
This will make documents with the term Shakespeare appear more relevant. You can also boost Phrase Terms as in the example: "Shakespearian plays"^4 "theatrical production"
Boolean operators
Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. The Cambridge Histories Online search supports AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as Boolean operators (Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS).
OR
The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document.
To search for documents that contain either "American modernism" or just "modernism" use the query: "American modernism" modernism or "American modernism" OR modernism.
AND
The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. This is equivalent to an intersection using sets. The symbol & can be used in place of the word AND.
To search for documents that contain "Shakespearian theatre" and "theatre productions" use the query: "Shakespearian theatre" AND "theatre productions".
+
The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exists somewhere in the field of a single document.
To search for documents that must contain "Elizabethan" and may contain "comedy" use the query: +Elizabethan comedy.
NOT
The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. This is equivalent to a difference using sets. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.
To search for documents that contain "theatre productions" but not "Shakespeare" use the query: "theatre productions" NOT "Shakespeare".
Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results: NOT "theatrical productions".
-
The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol.
To search for documents that contain "Elizabethan theatre" but not "theatre productions" use the query: "Elizabethan theatre" -"theatre productons".
Grouping
You may also group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query.
To search for either "Shakespeare" or "Marlowe" and "theatre" use the query: (Shakespeare OR Marlowe) AND theatre.
This eliminates any confusion and ensures that theatre must exist and either term Shakespeare or Marlowe may exist.
Stopword filtering
Stop words are small, frequently occurring words which are excluded by the Cambridge Histories Online search engine as they would produce a large number of results.
The list of stop words that are filtered currently are: [a, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, s, such, t, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with].
If you need to use stop words in your search, enclose your phrase containing stop words in double quotes.
Quick Search
The Quick Search facility is a fast and efficient search option available in the top right hand corner of every page on the Cambridge Histories site (except the Advanced search). Simply type one or more words into the input box and click 'Go'. The Quick Search will search all parts of the texts by default.
Multiple terms entered into the search box will be automatically treated as if they were combined using the Boolean operator AND. If you want to see matches to any one or more of your search terms, use the OR operator.
Advanced Search
The Advanced search page allows you to execute a more detailed search of Cambridge Histories Online using a combination of search fields:
- Full text (i.e. full text of a chapter)
- Author/editor
- Title
- Subjects
- Year of publication
- ISBN
- Text of extract/abstract
To conduct a search, type the required search terms (individual words or phrases) into the relevant search boxes. You may combine any number of fields and constraints: e.g. you might specify an author's name, year of publication and a number of terms that should appear within the full text. More complex searches may also be executed using Boolean and proximity searching.
When you have finished entering your search criteria, select the scope of your search to your chosen categories (select all or click individual categories) and click 'Start advanced search'. The Search results page will display the results of your search.
Note: Between search boxes, all terms are treated by default as if they were combined using the Boolean operator AND.
