Basically there is no difference searching upper- or lowercase. Search terms can be found in all linked (and unprotected) web pages or directories, office documents and PDF files of our universities main web server. Search terms are found in file names as well. A search term must contain at least two characters.
Data sets
You can optionally search in web pages only, in our staff search only or in both databases at the same time. For a few departments (UB, administration, ZIM) you can specifically search within their directory.
Strings and substrings
Without further options, entire word occurrences will be found. By using a wildcard you can find parts of words. *student* will find student as well as students.
Instead of * as a wildcard you can also use question marks, where each question mark stands for any character. m???r will find Meier, Mayer, as well as other words with 3 arbitrary characters between m and r. * and ? can be combined.
Searching fuzzy
If the exact spelling is unknown, you can search in fuzzy mode by appending a ~ (tilde) to your search term. A similarity-algorithm will find similar search hits. In compound search patterns, the tilde must be appended to each term.
Searching multiple words
To avoid too many hits, you should use more than one search word. If you enter more words separated by spaces, these are combined with a logical or. Files will also be found, that contain only one of the words in a document.
If you want to ensure that only documents - containing all specified search terms - are found, combine them with a logical AND (and).
To exclude a term within your search, you can specify this by negation with a NOT.
If you want to find words, that follow each other, put them in quotation marks. Within these quotes, no wildcards are allowed.
Examples:
Search for: Gaby AND Mustermann
will find files, that contain both names Mustermann and Gaby, but not necessarily following each other.
Search for: "Gaby Mustermann"
will find files, which contain these two names consecutively.
Search for: "Mustermann NOT Gaby"
will find files, containing Mustermann but not Gaby.
Searching links
In order to check, which websites refer to a specific page, you can specifically query the so-called outlinks:
All documents in a data set that refer to the mentioned page will be found. This is helpful, if you want to change a file name and try to estimate, which references in other web pages have to be adjusted.
Searching specific document types
If you only want to find search terms within PDF documents, you can specify the document type defining its so-called MimeType.
Search for:type:application/pdf AND Mustermann
will find PDF files containing Mustermann. You can combine this option with the above mentioned.
