Search Syntax

Searching in eHRAF is built with Apache Solr. This page covers several example search queries you can use with regular searches for paragraphs or searches on the browse documents page. Note that Advanced Searches perform some of this functionality using an interface, and it isn’t possible to use this syntax in an Advanced Search form.

Fielded Search

Search based on specific metadata fields for documents. Note that field names are lower case.

1. title:initiation (Demo): Searches for the word “initiation” in the title of the document.

2. title:(initiation !male) (Demo): Searches for the word “initiation” in the title where the word “male” is NOT present.

3. author:Whiting (Demo): Searches for the primary author Whiting.

4. author:Whiting NOT Beatrice (Demo): Searches for the author Whiting, but not Beatrice.

Phrase Searches

1. "land use" (Demo): Searches have to match the phrase “land use”.

2. title:"land use" (Demo): Searches have to match the phrase “land use” in the title field.

Wildcards

1. Hunt* (Demo): Searches for all words that start with hunt such as hunting, hunter, etc.

2. text:game? (Demo): Searches for all words that have any one character after the word. Would match Game, Games, or Gamey

Proximity matching

1. text:"unilocal unilineal"~5 (Demo): Finds occurrences where unilocal and unilineal appear within five words of each other.

2. text:"division labor"~3 (Demo): Finds occurrences where division and labor are within 3 words of each other.

Fuzzy searching

1. Monroe~ (Demo): Searches for words based on the Levenshtein distance. Therefore, this search might find Munroe, the correct spelling, as it is of similar spelling.

2. culture~.2 (Demo): Specifies a required similarity between 0 and 1. The default is .5.

Boosting a search term

Note: boosting works best when sorting by Relevance

1. Matrilineal^5 kinship (Demo): This search boosts the relevance of the word matrilineal.

2. author:"Métraux, Alfred"^2 OR authors:"Métraux, Alfred" (Demo): This search looks in the author field and additional authors field. However, the results prefer Métraux, Alfred as the primary author.

Searching for HRAF’s subject terms (OCMs)

1. ocm_ids:"342" (Demo): This search looks for the subject category from the Outline of Cultural Materials “Dwellings” which has the identifier 342 as a shorthand. Variables are tagged with OCMs.

2. subjects:"age stratification" (Demo): Searches for the Outline of Cultural Materials term “Age Stratification”. Note this is surrounded in quotes to match a phrase.

Range search

Caution

TO must be upper case.

1. pubdate:[2005 TO 2010] (Demo): Searches documents published from 2005 to 2010

Boolean searches

Caution

AND, OR, and NOT must be uppercase.

1. ocm_ids:"342" OR dwelling* (Demo): Searches for the OCM 342 or the word dwelling or dwellings.

2. (text:"division labor"~3) AND residence (Demo): Combines proximity match search with the word search for residence.