PrintUser's Guide & Site Help
5. Search
The site features many ways to search its content, from the Quick Search box to the Search Forms. The Quick Search box is at the top right of every page of the site. You can access the Search Forms via the Search option in the site's navigation bar.
5.1. Basic Guide for Conducting Searches
The following rules apply to all of the searches on the site. Some of them, however, are relevant only to non-numeric search fields.
5.1.1. Exact matches
Use quotation marks to tell Search that you are looking for a specific phrase. For example:
islamic state
will return all results in which both the term "islamic" and the term "state" appear, while
"islamic state"
will return only results that have the exact phrase "islamic state."
5.1.2. Boolean operators
Search supports the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.
AND
Unless you tell it otherwise, Search assumes that you only want results in which ALL of your search terms appear. This means that there is an implicit "AND" between all your search terms. So entering:
judicial theory
will return the same results as if you had entered:
judicial AND theory
OR
You can use the OR operator to tell Search to return results in which either search term exists. For instance, if you enter:
sunni OR shii
your results will include any article in which either "sunni" or "shii" exist.
NOT
The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. For example,
sunni NOT shii
will return all results for "sunni" which do not include the term "shii."
Proximity (NEAR)
Use the NEAR operator to specify search terms that you want to appear close to each other.
qur'an NEAR commentary
will return all results in which the terms "quran" and "commentary" appear within ten words of each other.
Nesting commands
Boolean commands can be nested. Use parentheses to tell Search which expressions to evaluate first. For example:
("abraham" OR "moses") AND "egypt"
5.1.3. Wildcards
You can use the * and ? wildcards in most non-numeric search fields. The question mark or ? character represents any single character.
For example h?zb?llah will return results for hizbullah and hezbollah
The asterisk or * character represents any number of character.
Entering sharia* will return results for sharia, shairah, and shariat
5.1.4. Special characters
The site is sensitive to diacritical marks, and permits searching with or without their use (using diacritics can be especially valuable in the Concordance, for instance). Thus a search for
abbasid
will return results that match the term ʿabbāsid as well as Abbasid and abbasid
5.1.5. Case sensitivity and punctuation
Search terms entered in all lower case will return results in both upper and lower cases. A search for
ummah
will return results that match both the variations "ummah" and "Ummah."
However, owing to case sensitivity, a search using all upper-case letters, such as "UMMAH"
will either have null results or will only locate instances of the word when it appears in upper case letters within the content.
Search is case insensitive when all search terms are lower case and case sensitive when capitalization is used. A search for:
Women's Association
will only return results that use "Women's" and "Association" with initial capitals, omitting results containing the words when they appear as "women's" or "association."
5.1.6. "Stop" words
By default, Search ignores certain common words in English. The stop words we use on the site are: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with.
Therefore a search entered as
people of the book
will seek out the works "people" and "book" and ignore the words "of" and "the".
To conduct an efficient search for a specific phrase containing stop words, enter your words surrounded by quotation marks:
"people of the book"
