Search Alaska Economic Trends articles from 1961 to Present
How to use the SOLR text search within an article
SOLR search criteria consist of terms and operators that search text within articles. However, search results can vary because SOLR uses “stemming” to find articles that meet your criteria. Stemming, a computerized algorithm, is used in many search engines to reduce words to their stem or root prior to the search. For example, if your search criterion is “earnings,” the algorithm will reduce the search to “earn” and find any article containing the words earn, earned, earning, and earnings. If you are looking for articles with a specific phrase and are not getting the results you want, try using the “AND” operator between each word in the phrase, as explained below.
- “USE QUOTES” to search for a phrase.
- For example, if you want to search for earnings by gender and you enter “earnings gender,” SOLR will search for that exact phrase. If you do not include the quotes, the search results will include any article that contains at least one of those words.
- USE BOOLEAN OPERATORS such as AND, OR, and NOT to create more complex searches.
These operators must be capitalized.
- OR is the default operator of any search not enclosed in quotes. OR tells the system to look for this word OR that word. For example, the search for gender earnings without an operator searches for any article with the words gender OR earnings.
- AND tells the system to look for this word AND that word. The search for gender AND earning tells the system to find articles that mention both gender AND earning. The AND operator can be written as AND or &&.
- NOT excludes terms from the search. For example, NOT Denali will exclude all articles that use the word Denali.
- Terms can be mandatory or excluded by placing a plus or minus sign before the term.
- The plus sign makes the term mandatory in the search results. For example, gender AND earning +Denali will look for any article that contains all three words: gender, earning, and Denali. This search can also be written as gender AND earnings AND Denali.
- The minus sign makes the term exempt from the search results. For example, gender AND earning –Denali will return articles that contain both gender and earnings but exclude those that contain the word Denali. This search can also be written as gender AND earnings NOT Denali.
- A search can include a wildcard character. The wildcard characters are a question mark
for one character, and an asterisk for any number of characters. Wildcard characters cannot be used
at the start of a word. However, they can be used anywhere within a word including the end.
- For example, ren? will look for any article that includes a four-letter word starting with ren. It will find the words rent or rend, but not rental or renting.
- Substituting * for ? tells the system to include any word that starts with ren, regardless of word length, such as renovate, rental, renew, and renaissance.
- If you wish to include special characters as search terms, you must escape them
by using the back slash \ before the desired character.
- For example, \(the second highest on record\) tells the system that the parentheses are part of the search term.