Search Tips

CAPA's website is indexed using the Funnelback search engine. Its interface is very similar to other search engines on the Internet, and if you are familiar with those, then you should have no problem using Funnelback. General usage of Funnelback is described below:

Cache

Funnelback keeps a copy of every document it accesses. You can view the cached copy of a document by clicking the [cached] link next to the summary (if you have access to the document). This will display the content of the document, as Funnelback saw it. It is useful if you're searching through PDF files, and wish to view the text inside them without having to load a PDF viewer.

Simple query

This is just a simple sequence of words, and it is the most common type of query.

julius caesar rome

Phrase operator

A phrase query can be specified by putting quote characters ("") around your query words. Using the phrase operator specifies that the component words must appear consecutively and in the order specified. Note that intervening punctuation, HTML tags etc will be ignored.

"hail caesar"

Dysjunction operator

The dysjunction operator acts like an OR in a Boolean language. The results will contain any document that has at least one of the query terms. For example:

[mighty brave] army

A full answer to this query will include the word army and one or more of mighty or brave.

Negation operator

The negation operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from the fully matching results.

caesar !brutus

A full answer to this query will include the word caesar but no occurrence of the word brutus. Unlike the mandatory exclusion operator (see below), partial results presented in subsequent result tiers may contain the word brutus.

Mandatory exclusion operator

The mandatory exclusion operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from all results. This is similar to the NOT operator in a Boolean language.

caesar -antony

A full answer to this query will include the word caesar but no occurrence of the word antony. Unlike the negation operator (see above), no results will contain the word antony in the indexable part of the text. The partial results are those which satisfy the mandatory constraint (no antony) but which do not contain caesar.

Mandatory inclusion operator

The mandatory inclusion operator will return results that all have the included terms.

antony +cleopatra

A full answer to this query will include the words antony and cleopatra. Every result will contain the word cleopatra.

Near (proximity) operator

The near operator (backquotes) requires that the query words appear, in any order, within 15 words of each other.

`army march`

The full answer to this query will be those documents that include the word army within 15 words of march (in any order).

Truncation operator

The truncation operator matches words that contain the query term.

anti*

This example pattern matches all words starting with anti, such as antium and antioch. Be careful, there are almost always more matching words than you expect.

The truncation operator can appear at the left, at the right or both, but NOT in the middle of the string.

*och*

This example pattern matches all words containing the string och, such as antioch and rochester.

Date Query

Date queries constrain the result set to documents that were modified/created during a specified time period.

d<1jan1600

The d<1jan1600 query returns documents that were modified/created before the 1st of January 1600.

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