Search Tips and Tricks

HU Search understands the following boolean operators:

• & - logical AND. For example: Iran & chador. Search will find any URLs that contain both Iran and chador. You can also use + for this operator.
• | - logical OR. For example Iran|chador. Search will find any URLs that contain the word Iran or the word chador.
• ~ - logical NOT. For example Iran & ~chador. Search will find URLs that contain the word Iran and do not contain the word chador at the same time. Note that ~ just excludes the given word from the results. Query ~chador will not find anything!
• () - group command to compose more complex queries. For example Iran | chador & ~Turkey. Query language is simple and powerful at the same time. Just consider the query as a usual boolean expression.
• Phrase search is activated by using double-quote "search this phrase" characters around the words. For example, the query "border crossing" will return only those documents having the word border immediately followed by the word crossing, while the query border crossing (i.e. without surrounding quotes) will not require both words to be close to each other.
  • *Note: * It is possible to combine two or more phrases in the same query, as well as combine phrases with boolean operators.
• Automatic phrase search is forced for complex words having dots, dashes, underscores, commas and slashes (-_.,/) as delimiters between word parts. For example, swing-arm automatically searches for phrase "swing arm", not just for two separate words.
• If you get a result: Search results: yourword: stopword. Means that the word you searched on is not indexed. If you think it SHOULD be indexed, please let me know.