Searching the whole website
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:
Searching specific types of content
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.
Filtering and sorting
Most sections of the website allow you to filter or refine your search by selecting different options from the left hand column of the page. This will include types of content, by date range, judgment subjects or offences and court, amongst others.
If we choose one of these filters, say
adopted law, then we will cut our number of results down to only those results which are Adopted laws. This panel is very powerful. When checkboxes are shown, you can select more than one filter.
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.
Advanced Searching
The JLIB website runs on the Sharepoint 2013 platform and search system which allows the use of a number of advanced search features.
Property Searching
Finally, managed properties are an incredibly powerful way to search and allow you to tailor your search to include results that match specific criteria beyond the content or title of the document.
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.
If you are going to link to Revised Laws from your own website or in e-mails please make use of this facility - run the search with the Chapter property specified and then copy the link in your browsers address bar, it should look like the example below.
https://www.jerseylaw.je/laws/revised/Pages/search.aspx?k=Chapter:13.125
Linking to the law(s) in this way ensures that all subordinate legislation and amendments that apply to that law (but which are not yet included in it) are displayed. Linking directly to the law pag will not otherwise show this additional information.
The table below provides a list of the properties that can be used in this way and which pieces of data are mapped to this property. The final column also links to lists of possible values for each property.
| Property Name | Mappings | Example(s) | Values |
|---|
Chapter
| Revised law chapter number
| Chapter:13.125
|
|
| Reference | Revised law chapter number
Law number/reference
Unreported Judgment number
Tribunal Judgment number
JLR number
Practice direction number
| Reference:[2017]*
Reference:13.*
| |
Judge
| Unreported Judgment Judge
Tribunal Chair/Judge
| Judge:Bailhache*
| |
Subject
| Unreported Judgment subject
Tribunal subject
Jersey Law Report subject
| Subject:Dismissal*
| |
Boolean searching - 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. You can substitute the
AND operator with the plus symbol
"+"
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. You can substitute the NOT operator with the minus symbol
"-"
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.
Proximity Operators - NEAR/ONEAR
The
NEAR operator matches the results where the specified search terms are within close proximity to each other but does not preserve the order of the terms. For example
"acquisition" NEAR "debt" will return all results where the word
acquisition is near to the word
debt
By default it will return results where the specified terms are within 8 words of one another - you can specify this distance by putting the distance in brackets after the NEAR operator. For example "acquisition" NEAR(4) "debt" will return all results where the words
acquisition and
debt are within 4 words of each other regardless of if they are 1, 2, 3 or 4 words apart.
The ONEAR operator performs the same function but
does preserve the order of terms. In other words the example
"acquisition" NEAR(4) "debt" will only return results where the words
acquisition and
debt are exactly 4 words apart.
Synonym Operators - WORDS
You use the WORDS operator to specify that the terms in the query are synonyms, and that results returned should match either of the specified terms.
The first query below matches results that contain either the term "Case" or the term "judgment". This matching behaviour is the same as if you had used the second query:
WORDS(Case, Judgment)
Case OR
Judgment
These queries differ in how the results are ranked. When you use the WORDS operator, the terms "Case" and "Judgment" are treated as synonyms instead of separate terms. Therefore, instances of either term are ranked as if they were the same term. For example, a page that contained one instance of the term "Judgment" and five instances of the term "Case" would be ranked the same as a page with six instances of the term "Case".
Dynamic Ranking
The
XRANK function allows you artificially boost the importance of documents in a search based on certain terms. The format of the XRANK usage is
(search terms) XRANK(nb=boostamount) boostexpression.
For example:
(cat OR dog) XRANK(nb=1.5) thoroughbred
This expression matches items which contain either "cat" or "dog". The expression increases the rank of items by 1.5 times that also contain "thoroughbred".
Please contact
webmaster@jerseylaw.je if you would like further information on the usage of XRANK
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.
Wildcards
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.
Combining advanced search functions
Most of the advanced search functions can be combined to create a very powerful means to query the website data. We have provided a few example queries below which illustrate how the functions can be combined.>
-
Subject:Assault* AND Judge:Bailhache* - Documents with a subject of "Assault" and a Judge with the name beginning "Bailhache"
-
Subject:Assault* OR Subject:Affray* - Documents with a subject starting "Assault" OR with a subject starting "Affray"
-
Reference:[2017]* AND Judge:Smith* - Documents with a reference number starting "[2017]" and a Judge named "Smith"