Advanced Search at a Glance

LAWNET supports many common search operators, singly or in combination, including search limiters such as and, or and not, wildcarding, nesting, and quoted expressions. Search results are returned ranked by relevance. Most matched terms will be highlighted on the results page.

LAWNET Advanced Search includes all of the functions of our Advanced Search. 

LAWNET Advanced Search supports search operators such as and, or and not, wildcarding, nesting, quoted expressions and category search. Search results are displayed ranked by relevance. Terms matching titles are highlighted (yellow) on the search results page.

And, Or, Not (Boolean Operators)

And: LAWNET by default supports an and search (find items that include all of the terms: murder and criminal ). You do not need to specify the word and unless you are doing a search with other operators. criminal murder provides the same results as criminal and murder .

Or: find all LAWNET items that include either terms: land or finance .

Not: find all items that have the first term but do not have the second term: company not land .

Nesting and Quoted Searches

Nesting: Nesting means using parentheses so that search operations are performed in the sequence you intend. Compare (murder or criminal) not racing versus murder or criminal not racing. LAWNET supports multiple nests, e.g. ((murder or criminal) not racing) and land

Quoted searches: Searches letter by letter, exactly as written within the quotation marks. Try "Commissioner from the operation" and then compare without the quotation marks to see how a quoted search can be very precise.

Wildcards and Stemming

LAWNET supports wildcarding, that is, truncating searches with an asterisk to retrieve all items matching the letters before the asterisk: commision*.

However, most searches don't require truncation, because LAWNET has built-in stemming, which is like truncation but more powerful. Stemming provides automatic support for a wide variety of word variations: bill also retrieves bills, tour retrieves tourism, and vice versa.

Stopwords

Stopwords are terms that you can't use in a search engine. LAWNET stopwords are the limiters and, or, and not. Quoted searches are the best way to get around these stopwords. See the difference with these two searches: do not call versus "do not call"

Exact Word Matching

Exact word matching is similar to truncation (wildcarding), but more powerful.

In LAWNET Advanced Search, you can search for more precise search results. Disabling stemming is a particularly useful strategy for words that our stemming software is not good with, such as communism or authority.  If you find you have too many results, try exact word matching.  Try an advanced search for commission with and without exact word matching to see the difference. 

LAWNET power search tip: you can disable stemming and still use right truncation (wildcarding).  Try a search for commission* with stemming disabled.  You will retrieve items matching commission and commissioner.

Advanced Search Categories

In Advanced Search, the search can be limited to the specified categories in the category drop-down list.