Search the St Vincent's Online Materials

Help on search

• What is this ?
• How do I do it ?
• What do I get and what do I do with it ?

What is this ?

The search facility allows you to perform keyword searches on the set of on-line materials provided on this web server. Searching can be performed on any one of the pre-defined document categories. The special category 'ALL' includes every page on the server.

How do I do it ?

Type one or more words into the search box then activate the 'Search' link. This performs a case-insensitive search using the keywords you specified. You don't need to put quotes around search words.

You can use the booleans and, or, or not in searching. Without these booleans, the search engine will assume you're anding the words together. Evaluation takes place from left to right only, although you can use parentheses to force the order of evaluation.

You can also use wildcards (asterisks) to search for matches to the beginnings of words only - you can't put asterisks at the front or in the middle of words.

  example 1: john and doe or jane
  example 2: john and (doe or not jane)
  example 3: not (john or jane) and doe
  example 4: j* and doe

1. This search evaluates the expression from left to right.
2. This search will also be evaluated from left to right, although the operation in parentheses will be evaluated as a whole first.
3. john or jane will be evaluated first, a not operation will be performed on that, then everything will be anded with doe.
4. This will search for all files that contain words starting with the letter j and that also contain doe.

What do I get and what do I do with it ?

Once the search is completed you will get a list of Web pages which satisfy the search criteria you specified, listed in decreasing order of relevance, as determined by the search engine.

Once you decide which document is of interesat to you you can go directly to that document by activating the link. In a PC world you would 'click' on the underlined URL of the document. In a VDU/Terminal world you would use the up/down arrow keys until the URL is highlighted then press return/enter key.