SBCSearch Help & Instructions

How to use SBCSearch

1. Natural Language Search - is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question. After a natural language search, SBCSearch sorts the results by their relevance to your search request.

2. Boolean Search - consists of a group of words or phrases linked by boolean connectors like AND and OR.

faith and prayer	Both words must be present
cp or cpmissions	Either words can be present
churches and not missions	Only churches must be present
seminary w/5 professor	seminary shows up within 5 words of professor
seminary not w/5 students	seminary does not show up within 5 words of students
If you would like to use more than one boolean connector, you can use a parenthesis to indicate the precedence of operation. For example: (faith and prayer) or grace

Misspelled Word Searching or Fuzzy Search

Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. For example, a fuzzy search for apple will find appple. Fuzzy searching can be useful when you are searching text that may contain typographical errors, or for text that has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR). There are two ways to add fuzziness to searches:

Enable fuzziness for all of the words in your search request. You can adjust the level of fuzziness from 1 to 10.

You can also add fuzziness selectively using the % character. The number of % characters you add determines the number of differences dtSearch will ignore when searching for a word.

The position of the % characters determines how many letters at the start of the word have to match exactly. Examples:

ba%nana Word must begin with ba and have at most one difference between it and banana.
b%%anana Word must begin with b and have at most two differences between it and banana.

 

Gammatical Variations or Stemming

Stemming extends a search to cover grammatical variations on a word. For example, a search for fish would also find fishing. A search for applied would also find applying, applies, and apply. There are two ways to add stemming to your searches:

Check the Stemming box in the search form to enable stemming for all of the words in your search request. Stemming does not slow searches noticeably and is almost always helpful in making sure you find what you want.

If you want to add stemming selectively, add a ~ at the end of words that you want stemmed in a search. Example: apply~

 

Sounds Alike Searching or Phonic Searching

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for Smith will also find Smithe and Smythe.

To ask dtSearch to search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Examples: #smith, #johnson

You can also check the Phonic searching box in the search form to enable phonic searching for all words in your search request. Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching and tends to make searches over-inclusive, so it is usually better to use the # symbol to do phonic searches selectively.

Words, Phrases or Sentences or Natural Language Searching

A natural language search request is any combination of words, phrases, or sentences. After a natural language search, SBCSearch sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words and search connectors like NOT and OR are ignored.

AND Connector

Use the AND connector in a search request to connect two expressions, both of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example:

faith and prayer would retrieve any document that contained both phrases.

 

OR Connector

Use the OR connector in a search request to connect two expressions, at least one of which must be found in any document retrieved.

cp or cpmissions would retrieve any document that contained cp, cpmissions, or both.

 

W/n Connector

Use the W/n connector in a search request to specify that the first word or phrase mush occur within n words of the second word or phrase.

seminary w/5 professor would retrieve any documents that have seminary within 5 words of professor

You can combine AND and OR with the W/n connector to produce a complex search expression.

(teacher or professor) w/5 seminary

(teacher w/5 seminary) w/10 students

Some types of expression will produce ambiguous results and therefore cannot be used or relied upon to produce valid search results.

(teacher and professor) w/10 (school and seminary)

Rather, the search expression connected with W/n must be a single word or a phrase connected by the OR connector. The above example should be:

(teacher and professor) w/10 (school or seminary)

 

NOT and NOT W/n Connector

Use NOT in front of any search expression to reverse its meaning. This is equivalent to exluding those documents from the search.

sunday school and not college

NOT can be used in front of a word to retrieve all documents that did not contain the word.

not baptist press

If NOT is not the first word in a request, you'll need to use either AND or OR with NOT.

school and not seminary

Unlike the W/n operator, the NOT W/n is not symmetrical. For example: seminary w/5 professor is not the same as professor w/5 seminary.

Words and Phrases

You do not need to use any special punctuation or commands to search for a phrase. Simply enter the phrase the way it ordinarily appears. You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:

baptist faith

If a phrase contains a noise word, SBCSearch will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.

 

Wildcards (* and ?)

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

appl* would match apple, application, etc.

*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.

appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.

ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

 

Advance Search Requests

Search words and phrases may also include the following special characters.

?	Matches any single character. Example: seminar? matches seminary or seminars
*	Matches any number of characters. Example: afghan* matches afghanistan
~	Stemming. Example: apply~ matches apply, applies, applied
%	Fuzzy Search. Minor misspellings of the word will also be found.
#	Search words that sound alike and begin with same letter. Example: #smith matches smith, smythe
~~	Match numeric range. Example: 12~~24 matches 18
:	Variable term weighting. Example: seminary:5 w/5 professor:1