Additional Search Features - Opinions - California Dept. of Justice

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Additional Search Features

There are several features which you can utilize with both simple and advanced searches.

Special Symbols * ~ | Precedence of Operators | Using Parentheses in Searches | Date Searching

SPECIAL SYMBOLS * ~

There are two special symbols which change the meaning of the words entered in a search.
*
The * symbol is a wildcard and can be used to search for any number of significant characters. Only one wildcard can be used per word. The * wildcard can be used at the beginning or the middle of a word. Note that the amount of time to complete the search will increase as the position of the * moves toward the beginning of the word. The * wildcard can also be used on its own to select all documents in the opinion database. Only the first word of each document will be highlighted.
~
The ~ symbol activates word tense conflation. (e.g., argu* will get argue, argued, arguing, argument, etc.) Type the ~ immediately following the word; do not include a space.

See Also:
Command-Based Search

PRECEDENCE OF OPERATORS

Opinions will assume a precedence, that is, an order for handling multiple operators in a complex search. The default precedence is:

Phrases
//, LABEL, IN, EXCEPT, TO, BEFORE, AFTER
\\
..., .., AND, OR, NOT

Where a search expression, or portion of an expression, contains several operators of the same precedence, Opinions will process from left to right.

For example: bonus AND manager OR supervisor will be interpreted as find all documents containing both bonus and manager OR those which contain supervisor.

To find documents that contain bonus and manager, OR supervisor, the search could be entered as: manager OR supervisor AND bonus

USING PARENTHESES IN SEARCHES

You can control the order of precedence by using parentheses "( )". Just as we can use intonation in speech to clearly express a sentence that could be misinterpreted, we use parentheses to clearly express a search, overriding the Opinions defaults where necessary.

For example, the search:

car allowance // manager OR salesman The above phrase is unterpreted using the default precedence as follows:

((car allowance) // manager) OR salesman Since the phrase car allowance has highest precedence, and the // or Near By operator has higher precedence than the OR operator.

To locate those documents containing the phrase car allowance in the same paragraph as either manager or salesman, use:

car allowance // (manager OR salesman) Parentheses may be used anywhere sensible within a search. Examples include:

(manager OR supervisor) // bonus
the (quick OR slow) brown (fox OR kangaroo)
(manage* // (bonus OR reward) // paid) AND excess*
pet hates ... (alligator OR crocodile)
(Jones OR Smith)IN Author: AND media IN Subject:

See Also:
Command-Based Search

DATE SEARCHING

Dates may be used in searches and will be located regardless of the form in which they are expressed in the search or in the document.

For the purposes of proximity searching, the entire date is considered to be a single hit, even if the date is actually expressed in three or four words. The exact location of the hit is taken to be that of the last component of the date. This is why only the final portion of the date sequence is highlighted in the Opinions browse page. Some examples of date searching:

20 September 1994 9/20/94 September 20, 1994