In addition to the boolean operators "and," "or," and "not," InfoHawk uses symbolic operators for wildcards, truncation and proximity. These are useful when you want to search for variations of a word or when you want to find words within a certain distance from each other.
Wildcards: ?, *,#, !
Wildcards allow you to replace one or more characters with a symbol when you aren’t sure how to spell something or you want to search for a variety of words with a single search.
Here are some examples:
? or * are placeholders for any number of characters in a word,
e.g., m?d = mad, mankind, mold, etc.
# is a placeholder for one character that may or may not be present, e.g., harbo#r = harbor or harbour.
! is a placeholder for one character that must be present, e.g., wom!n = women or woman.
Truncation ? or *
A search term can be shortened by using ? or * as a truncation symbol. Truncating allows InfoHawk to retrieve singular and plural forms and to accept variant spellings of search terms. You may use only one instance of truncation in a single search word.
flor? Retrieves all records that have words beginning with "flor" (floral, florist, Florida, etc.)
*benzene retrieves all records that have words ending with "benzene".
If you get an error message indicating that there were too many hits, please reformulate or narrow your search.
Adjacency/Proximity %, !
In keyword searches, InfoHawk allows users to search for terms in close proximity to one another through two different operators. The first operator, %0, will retrieve words that occur adjacent or near each other in a record, regardless of the order of the terms.
For example, a keyword search for "heat %0 engineering" will retrieve records with heat engineering or engineering heat in them. Combining this operator with a number lets the user specify the maximum number of words between the two terms. So the search "Hepburn %4 Tracy" will look for Tracy no more than 4 words before or after Hepburn in a record.
The second operator, !0, requires that the terms appear in the record in the order they appear in the search query. So the keyword search "heat !0 engineering" will only retrieve records with the phrase heat engineering and "Hepburn !4 Tracy" will only retrieve records where Hepburn precedes Tracy by no more than 4 words.
If you get unexpected results, reformulate your search.