| To search for terms on viaContext™, enter one or more keywords into the search field and click the search button. The search returns documents that contain all of the search keywords in the document itself or in the attached metadata. Some characters and abbreviations (see below) have a special meaning and extend the search capabilities. |
| In addition, viaContext™ allows for restricting the search to selected fields of the attached metadata. This feature provides a way to perform a full-text search exclusively on metadata fields like author, format, description, etc. |
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| Case Sensitivity |
| All searches are case-insensitive. In other words, the search engine finds matching terms regardless of the case in which you entered the terms. |
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| Searching for Phrases |
| Enclose the phrase in double or single quotes. Example: "regular expression", or 'regular expression' returns documents that contain exactly the phrase within the quotes. |
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| Boolean AND ( & ) |
| Use the AND operator to search documents that contain at least one occurrence of each of the query terms. E.g., dog AND cat returns documents that contain dog and cat. (You can also type the symbol & instead of the word AND.) If you do not specify other boolean operators for a keyword, operator AND is used by default! |
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| Boolean OR ( | ) |
| Use the OR operator to search for documents that contain at least one occurrence of any of the query terms. E.g., dog OR cat returns documents that contain dog or cat. (You can also type the symbol | instead of the word OR.) |
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| Boolean NOT ( - ) |
| Use the NOT operator to search for documents that contain one query term and exclude another query term. E.g., dog NOT cat returns documents that contain dog, but do not contain cat. (You can also type the symbol - instead of the word NOT, e.g., dog -cat). You cannot start a query with NOT. |
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| NEAR ( ; ) |
| Use the NEAR operator to search for documents with a high proximity of two or more query terms. Documents get higher scores for terms closer together, and lower scores for terms farther apart. You can specify the maximum distance between words. E.g., NEAR((dog, cat), 6) will issue results where dog is within 6 words of cat. (You could accomplish the same with ;((dog, cat), 6). |
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| STEM ( $ ) |
| Use the $ operator to search for terms that have the same linguistic roots as the query term. E.g., $compute returns documents that contain compute, computer and computing. |
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| SOUNDEX ( ! ) |
| Use the ! operator to expand queries to include words that have similar sounds; that is, words that sound like other words. This function enables comparison of words that are spelled differently, but sound alike. |
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| Combinations are allowed |
| All meaningful combinations of the operators described here are allowed. E.g., dog AND cat NOT horse returns documents that contain dog and cat, but not horse. You may group items using parentheses to perform more complex searches, such as: (VB OR "Visual Basic") AND (Database NOT "SQL Server"). |
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