You can use the portal’s search slot to carry out extended and more complex search queries and thus restrict, extend, personalise, and refine the search results as you wish. This can ensure a higher quality and relevance of the hit rate as well as save valuable time.
The most important search tools are explained below.
Simple search: If, for example, you search for Andreas Hofer, all results containing the term Andreas and/or the term Hofer are displayed. Results containing both terms are displayed with priority.
Phrase search: If you want to search for one or more phrases in a certain order, put the desired terms in inverted commas. Only results in which the exact sequence of words (or characters) occurs are displayed. For example, “Oswald von Wolkenstein”.
By using the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, you can combine simple search terms as well as phrases and thus expand or restrict the percentage of results. Boolean operators must be written in capital letters.
OR (search is expanded): If search terms are linked with the operator OR, the result list returns all results in which at least one of the linked search terms is present. Results containing all search terms are displayed with priority. For example:
AND (search is restricted): The AND operator is used to combine two or more terms or phrases. This means that the result list only delivers hits containing all terms or phrases. For example:
NOT (search is restricted): If you link search terms with the operator NOT, results containing the terms or phrases to the right of the operator are excluded from the search. If you search for the name Andreas (e.g. for linguistic reasons), but want to avoid results relating to the well-known personality Andreas Hofer, you can use:Andreas NOT Hofer.
Searching with “Wild cards”: If you replace a letter of the search term with the character ?, the search is performed with all possible letter combinations for ? and a higher response rate is achieved. This option is particularly important for different spellings: The search term Grie? produces results for Gries and Grieß; the search term T?rol produces results for Tyrol and Tirol.
Searching with Truncation: The character * can be used to precede, insert or follow a term. This will search all possible combinations of characters (indefinite length) in relation to the letters used. This is particularly important for compounds and for finding different grammatical forms. For example, the search term photo* can find the terms photo, photography, photographer, etc. The search term *graphy may find photography, lithography, bibliography, etc.
Fuzzy search: Fuzzy search can be used if you are not sure how a term was spelled, to avoid spelling mistakes or to avoid errors in OCR recognition. With fuzzy search, a value must be added to the search term indicating how different a word can be from the search term in order to display it in the list of results. This value ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 where 0.0 is the original term without any difference, whereas 1.0 is the maximum difference to the term. For example, Bozen~0.1 returns results for Boxen, Boten and Noten.
Proximity search: To find results that are related in content, the proximity search can be very useful. This defines the maximum quantity of words that can occur between two search terms, to be considered a valid result in the list. For this purpose, the character ~ is used in combination with inverted commas. For example, the search term "architecture Bolzano"~10 indicates that a maximum of 10 words between the two terms architecture and Bolzano is allowed.
Priority search: By using the priority search, you can give precedence to one search term over another. This is done using the character ^ and a numerical value indicating the priority level. For example, Meran^4 Bozen means that the term Meran has four times the priority of the term Bozen and the results are ranked accordingly.