Search Hints
Basic Search | Search for Phrase | Advanced Search
Basic Search
A basic search from the Utilities bar will find any documents containing at least one of the words that you enter in the 'Search' text box.
Example: After typing the words anzac frigate into the search text box, the search would return any documents containing either the word "anzac" or the word "frigate".
Search for Phrase
A phrase search will return documents that contain the phrase that has been entered into the search text box.
Example: Typing the words collins class surrounded by quotation marks into the search text box would return any documents containing the exact phrase 'collins class'.
The difference between using multiple words in the basic search and using multiple words in the phrase search is that the individual 'basic search' text words can appear anywhere in the result documents, whereas the individual words in a 'phrase' must appear together, just as you typed them.
Advanced Search
Why use a Boolean search?
The search facility finds all the documents that contain the words or text you nominate. Sometimes we find too many documents as a result of a search. At such times, an Advanced (boolean) Search Facility might help to narrow down the results.
Boolean searching is based on mathematical set theory. Essentially, it is a way of specifying a complex search using "operators" like AND, OR and NOT together with mandatory, optional or prohibited search terms.
The OR search
Suppose you were searching for documents containing the word Army. A search would probably return a large number of documents containing 'Army'. If you then searched for Navy you would again be presented with a large list of documents, this time containing the word 'Navy'.
An or Boolean search would return all of the documents that contained either of the words.
To find all the documents on either Army or Navy in one go you could enter the following search query:
The results will be the same as if you had typed Army Navy in the basic search in the Utilities bar, or if you had typed Army Navy in the advanced search and selected 'free text' from the drop-down box.
The AND search
Now, if you wanted to narrow the search down to list only those documents that cover both Army and Navy, you would use a Boolean expression using the and operator.
The basic NOT search
Now suppose that you want to find documents on the Army that do not contain references to the Navy. The search query would look like:
More complex Boolean searches
Suppose you want to find documents on the Air Force that do not refer to either the Army or the Navy.
The Boolean expression could be expressed in a couple of different ways. Both of the expressions below represent the same subset of documents.
OR
Theoretically, you can have as many terms as you like in a search string, provided they are separated by Boolean operators.
Using phrases as search terms
In any Boolean expression, the search terms themselves can be phrases, rather than single words.
You could use the phrases Air Force and Training Excercises to find materials about both topics. In this case, the search would be entered as follows.