Search From the Home Page
This search bar is found on the homepage, or, on mobile, by clicking on the magnifying glass icon:
Both these search bars search the whole jerseylaw.je site. For a narrower search, you will find a search bar under each of the main headings.
Example: Search results pages will look similar to the following:
Here you can see an example where a user has searched everything for the keyword test. But what if I wanted to refine my search?
Refining your search
There are a number of ways:
-
Using the search tabs
-
Using quotation marks
-
Using AND/OR/NOT operators
-
Using wildcards
-
Using search filters
-
Sorting
-
Managed properties
Using the search tabs
If you know what type of document you are searching for, a quick way to refine is to use the search tabs:
Simply click on the tab you want, and you will be taken to those specific results.
Using quotation marks
Using quotes is a quick way to make a more specific search. For example, when searching for the word test, it appears in a number of places, such as test for, law test, appropriate test.
Example:
Let’s try out quotation marks – search for "appropriate test" as shown below:
You can see that the number of results is significantly reduced when compared to searching for
appropriate test (without quotes):
You can see we have a lot more results, as it is searching for either word independently, the equivalent of using the OR operator. By using the double quotes, we are saying find these words where they appear together, in this specific order.
Using Operators - AND/OR/NOT
Another method of searching would be to use operators. These operators being AND, OR and NOT. By default the search engine is set up to use the AND operator.
What is the difference?
AND – will combine both words together, meaning it will only bring documents up when both words are present within it.
NOTE: the words do not necessarily have to be next to one another.
OR – will run the same search, but it will separate the words and search for them both individually, returning results for each word.
NOT – can be used to cancel out words, or even be used to eliminate false positives. For example you could search for Jersey NOT Guernsey. This would cancel out all the documents, with the word Guernsey in them and only show results with the word Jersey in them.
Using the example above, if appropriate test was to be searched, it would automatically use the AND operator. If I wanted to use the OR operator I would need to search for appropriate OR test.
If you want a more refined search, please look above at the double quotes search.
The Asterisk Wildcard
The asterisk (*) wildcard is a special character, which helps when you want to get variations of a term, or where you are unsure about spelling.
For example, if we didn’t know how to spell appropriate, we could search for
appro* - getting search results back as below:
Notice how other words beginning with
appro are now included – approximately, approach, etc.
Search Filtering or Refining
Notice above we have 8,294 results. Let’s say we want to cut that down.
The filter results panel on the right can help us with that.
If we choose one of these filters, say adopted law, then we will cut our number of results down to 2. This panel is very powerful. When checkboxes are shown, you can select more than one filter.
Sorting results
Sorting results is a quick way to reorganise the results that you have already received, and is performed using the sorting box:
This allows you to search by relevance (the default), and date (newest first or oldest first). Depending on the section, there may also be A-Z.
Managed properties
Finally, managed properties are an incredibly powerful way to search.
Example: you can search Revised Laws by Chapter, using the search term (e.g.) Chapter:08.080 which will bring back only one result: The Computer Misuse (Jersey) Law 1995.
Combining this with the wildcard (e.g.) Chapter:08.* will return all results in Chapter 08.