Help for the SÖF search engine

Simple Search

Searching individual words

You can enter one or several search terms. When entering more than one term, seperate them by blanks.

Entry: feeding agriculture 
The return will show all pages and files which contain "feeding" as well as "agriculture". 

Searching phrases

It is possible to search for phrases, entire sentences or parts of sentences. In this case, enter a phrase and put the entire search term in inverted commas.

Entry: "Strategies to cope with systemic risks"
Will return all pages which contain exactly this phrase.

Searching in titles only

If you want to include only titles in your search, you can use the keyword "title:". Please note that the search term has to follow the keyword directly and that there is no blank between the colon and the search term.

Entry: title:feeding title:agriculture
The return will give all pages and files containing "feeding" as well as "agriculture" in the title

Advances search

Targeted exclusion of document

In addition to the search functions of the simple search, the advances search facilitates the targeted exclusion of specific areas and file types.

Example: You want to search only in PDF files.
How-to: Tick the box "Articles" in order to exclude these areas from the search.

Logically linking words (Boolean operators)

The advances search enables a replacement of AND links by OR links or an individual optimizing of the query by means of Boolean operators (AND / OR / NOT).

Entry: feeding NOT agriculture
Finds documents which contain the word "feeding" but not the word "agriculture".

Entry: (feeding AND agriculture) OR climate
Finds documents which contain either "feeding" and "agriculture" or only the word "climate".

Entry: (feeding AND agriculture) NOT climate 
Finds documents which contain "feeding" and "agriculture" but not "climate". 

Sorting

The result can be sorted by different aspects:

• Ranking - relevance of search result 
• Title - alphabetical sorting of the title 
• Time - sorting by the date of the last modification or the writing of the article or document

An inverse sorting is also possible.

Date of the most recent amendment

The option "is older than" and "is more recent than" enables a filtering of documents by their most recent amendment.

Option: "is more recent than" und "3 months"
Finds only documents which are modified no longer than three months ago.

Access and display of search hits

Whem your search was successfull, all hits will be displayed in a list. Each hit can be accessed by clicking on the title. An internal function is used for marking your search words on the hit page. A click on the URL address in the last line of the hit will return the page without marking of the search terms.

A small symbol is displayed before the title if the hit is a PDF document.