TIPS & TRICKS
on entering Search Terms
Did you get too many hits when you searched for a particular term? Can’t find what you’re looking for despite your best efforts? This page lists various search parameters and commands you can use to refine your search:
Album and Page Search
Product Search
Multiple word searches:
In its standard settings, a search engine generally tries to find all of the words entered, but it does also list results that are only a partial match for the search terms. The more search terms you enter, the more relevant the results will be. You can enter the keyword “OR” to explicitly command the search engine to respond this way. Entering a phrase such as “God is gracious” will therefore yield the same results as entering “God OR is OR gracious”. This tells the search engine to find all documents that contain at least one of these three words.
To specify a search in which all of the search terms are found, you can use the keyword “AND”. Entering “God AND is AND gracious” as the search term tells the search engine to look only for documents that contain all three terms.
Excluding words:
You can use the “+” and “-” symbols to tell the search engine which words absolutely must or must not be present in the document. Entering “+God -service” tells the search engine to look for all documents that contain the term “God”, but not the term “service”. If you place the “+” symbol before all search terms, it also has the same effect as linking the terms together using the “AND” operator..
You can also use the keyword “NOT” instead of the “-” symbol. This is especially useful when various search terms are grouped together within parentheses “( )”. Entering “(God AND among AND us) OR (Jesus AND lives -Christmas)” searches for documents containing either the terms “God”, “among”, and “us”, or the words “Jesus” and “lives”, but not the word “Christmas”.
Searching for punctuation:
If you wish to search for a particular item of punctuation, such as the “+” symbol, you can do so by placing a backslash (AltGr + question mark on a German keyboard, backslash key above the Enter key on a U.S. keyboard) before the symbol, like this: “\+”.
Searching for exact groups of words:
If you enter a search term in quotation marks, the search engine will search for exactly that group of words. This option can be used for song titles, for example.
Search term spelling unknown:
If you are unsure of how to spell certain words for your search, you can use the “?” and “*” symbols as “wild cards.” The question mark indicates that one letter has been omitted, and the asterisk that any possible number of letters have been omitted. If you were to enter “c?t”, therefore, the search engine would find documents containing the words “cat”, “cut”, and “cot”, while entering “c*t” would find all words that begin with C and end with T, including “cat”, “cut”, and “cot”, but also “caught”, “cabinet”, and “Connecticut”.
The search engine is also capable of performing a “fuzzy” or inexact search if you place a tilde (“~”) after the search term (AltGr + asterisk on a German keyboard, Shift + ` on a U.S. keyboard). Searching for “red~” would yield all hits for “red” itself and all related words, such as “ret” and “read”. You can also enter a number between 0.1 and 1 after the tilde to define the degree of relation. The closer this number is to 1, the more closely related the search term and results must be. This is useful for further refining the quantity of search results.
Weighting a search term:
Last but not least, you can also change the weighting of a search term within a search, thereby affecting how the search results are sorted. If you search for “God^4 church”, the search engine outputs all pages that contain the terms “God” or “church”, but for sorting purposes, a document that contains the term “God” one time is considered just as important as a document that contains the term “church” four times.
You can also combine all of these options as needed.
Partial word searches:
The Product Search function finds partial words. That means that if you search for “out”, this function automatically finds words such as “outside”, “mouth”, “without”, “gout”, and so on. You can use the “^” symbol to specify the beginning of a word or the “$” symbol to define the end of a word. If you enter “out$”, the search engine will find words such as “without” and “gout”, but not “outside” or “mouth”, because these words do not end in “out”.
Search term spelling unknown / searching for groups of words:
You can use parentheses “( )” to form search groups, and there are symbols called “quantifiers” that you can place after the search string to limit the number of times it occurs in the search results. The quantifier “*” means that the term must occur 0 or more times and “+” that it must occur 1 or more times, while the “?” symbol limits the number of times the search string occurs to 0 or 1. For example, entering “c(h)*(o)+p” would yield the words “cop”, “chop”, and “coop” (and “chhop”, if that were a possible combination of letters), because in that case the search engine would look for all words that begin with B, followed by any number of instances of “o” (including zero) that are followed by at least one “a” and exactly one “r.”
You can use the “|” symbol (AltGr + < on the German keyboard, Shift + backslash on the U.S. keyboard) with terms in parentheses to express an “exclusive or,” meaning that searching for the expression “a(b|c)d” will yield “abd” and “acd”, but not “abcd”. This option becomes interesting when you combine it with the abovementioned quantifiers. Entering “a(b|c)*d”, for example, would give you results including “ad”, “abd”, “acd”, “abcd”, “abbcd”, and so on – meaning all character strings that begin with “a”, end in “d”, and contain any possible number of instances of “b” and “c” in between.
