9.4. Search Tips

Last Updated 05/15/2024

Tips for Searching the Catalog

Evergreen tries to approach search from the perspective of a major search engine: the user should simply be able to enter the terms they are looking for as a general keyword search, and Evergreen should return results that are most relevant given those terms. For example, you do not need to enter author’s last name first, nor do you need to enter an exact title or subject heading. Evergreen is also forgiving about plurals and alternate verb endings, so if you enter dogs, Evergreen will also find items with dog.

White Space and Punctuation

White spaces before or after a word are ignored. So, a search for [ golden compass ] gives the same results as a search for [golden compass].
A double dash or a colon between words is reduced to a blank space. So, a title search for golden:compass or golden — compass is equivalent to golden compass.
Punctuation marks occurring within a word are removed; the exception is _. So, a title search for gol_den com_pass gives no result.
Diacritical marks and solitary & or | characters located anywhere in the search term are removed. Words or letters linked together by . (dot) are joined together without the dot. So, a search for go|l|den & comp.ass is equivalent to golden compass.
Upper and lower case letters are equivalent. So, Golden Compass is the same as golden compass.

Word Order and Choice

Enter your search words in any order. So, a search for compass golden gives the same results as a search for golden compass. Adding more search words gives fewer but more specific results.
This is also true for author searches. Both David Suzuki and Suzuki, David will return results for the same author.
Use specific search terms. Evergreen will search for the words you specify, not the meanings, so choose search terms that are likely to appear in an item description. For example, the search luxury hotels will produce more relevant results than nice places to stay.
The search engine has no stop words (terms are ignored by the search engine): a title search for to be or not to be (in any order) yields a list of titles with those words.
Search for an exact phrase using double-quotes. For example “golden compass”.
The order of words is important for an exact phrase search. golden compass is different than compass golden.
White space, punctuation and capitalization are removed from exact phrases as described above. So a phrase retains its search terms and its relative order, but not special characters and not case.
Truncation: Words may be right-hand truncated using an asterisk. Use a single asterisk * to truncate any number of characters. (example: environment* agency)

Boolean operators

Classic search interfaces (that is, those used primarily by librarians) forced users to learn the art of crafting search phrases with Boolean operators. To a large extent this was due to the inability of those systems to provide relevancy ranking beyond a "last in, first out" approach. Thankfully, Evergreen, like most modern search systems, supports a rather sophisticated relevancy ranking system that removes the need for Boolean operators in most cases.

By default, all terms that have been entered in a search query are joined with an implicit AND operator. Those terms are required to appear in the designated fields to produce a matching record: a search for golden compass will search for entries that contain both golden and compass. Two phrases are also joined by an implicit and, so a search for "golden compass" "dark materials" is equivalent to golden compass and dark materials.

Words that are often considered Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, and NOT, are not special in Evergreen: they are treated as just another search term. For example, a title search for golden and compass will not return the title Golden Compass.

However, Evergreen does support Boolean searching for those rare cases where you might require it, using symbolic operators as follows:

Table 69.1. Boolean symbolic operators

Operator	Symbol	Example
AND	`&&`	`a && b`
OR	`\|\|`	`a \|\| b`
NOT	`-`term	`a -b`

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