Frankfurt Rights has upgraded the search feature, to make it easier for everyone to find the content they are looking for.
First of all, it can now search as you type and suggest words as well. So whatever word or phrase you are looking for, the search field will begin suggesting searches based on what you type.
Capitalisation also doesn’t matter to the search, so Superman, SUPERMAN and superman will be treated exactly the same.
In addition to being able to just search for words or phrases, you can now specify which part of an entry should be searched.
To do this, click on the sliders on the right side of the search field.
In the dropdown-menu, you can check and uncheck which part of an entry you would like to include. But wait, the search doesn’t only look at what is visible in the detailed view of a title, i.e.:
- Title
- Authors
- Description
- Publisher
- Imprint
- ISBN13
- ISBN10
- Keywords
But it will now also index and make searchable, the
- Content Sample
- Supporting Information and
- Manuscript
should these files have been uploaded by the publishers as well.
Along with this new menu, a powerful suite of new so-called search-operators can be used to create more elaborate searches. We will try to keep it simple, however these tools provide very powerful ways of refining your search in ways that have not been possible before.
Exact search
If you want to search for a specific phrase, or a combination of words in an exact order, put them in double quotes "".
Example: “design software” (20 results)
The same phrase without quotes would return 60625 results, because it would be showing anything that has either the word design or software, as well as both.
Boolean operators
Searching for books has become more mathematical!
You can now use three operators to signify math-like operations.
1. The first one is the plus-sign: +
Using this in your search signifies AND, just like in maths, and will only return results that have all the words you combined this way.
Example: design+software returns 30266 results, since there are this many items that include both these words.
Anything with only one of the words is not included in the results.
2. The second is the vertical line: |
Using this in your search signifies OR, meaning that any word on either side of the sign can be part of your search.
Example: design | software returns 60630 results. So all the titles with either the word design, or the word software, or both.
(OR is also the default way the search works, this means that, although we used the | in the example, in this specific case it is unnecessary. But for more complicated cases, the | becomes very useful.)
3. The third is the minus-sign: -
Using this in your search signifies that you want to exclude whatever word is followed by it.
Example 1: -software
return all the titles that don’t have software in them
Example 2: design -software
returns any book with design in them or any book that doesn’t have software in it.
Example 3: design + -software
returns any item that has design but not software in it.
Example 4: design -software -techniques
Returns titles that contain design, or titles that don’t contain software or techniques.
Grouping
Finally, just like in maths, you can use parentheses () to group search terms, creating elaborate ways to very specifically find what you are looking for.
Example: design + (software | techniques)
Will return any book that definitely has design and either software or technique as well.
Wildcard and Proximity
The last two operators are not quite as mathematical, but useful nonetheless.
The asterisk * allows wildcards and can be put anywhere in the word or phrase.
Example: tech*
Will return anything that begins with tech, so includes words like tech, technology, technique, techno, etc.
Similarly, putting the wildcard at the front, can yield the following results:
Example: *search
Will return anything that ends with search, like search, research, researching, etc.
The tilde ~ is the final operator we will take a look at. Using the tilde plus a number you can perform a so-called proximity search. The tilde is put at the end of a phrase in quotation marks, followed by a number that signifies how close the words are supposed to be to one another.
The example hopefully helps lift the confusion.
Example: “design software”~4
Will return anything that has the words design and software within 4 words of each other. So design of software, design of good software, design of good cheap software and design of good cheap blue software would all be included in the results.
There are many tricks you can employ to refine your search and we really hope you put the new functions and the operators to good use.
Please feel free to get in touch with us at any time.