Search Hints and Tips

There is also help available on syntax and navigation:

• Operators
  • Boolean Operators
  • Special Operators
• Wildcards
• Results Navigation
• Narrowing Your Search
• Additional Notes

Operators

Boolean Operators

The Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT may be used to refine your search query in all fields on the form. You can also use quotation marks - " " - to search for phrases, and parentheses - ( ) - to group terms together.  For example, if in the title field you entered "web programming" and not (activex or java) will find all books with titles that contain the phrase web programming but not the words activex or java.

Should you leave out a Boolean operator where one is expected the search system will insert the appropriate operator for the field (as shown on the search form). For instance, you could write the previous example as "web programming" not (activex or java) and the missing and operator will be inserted before the not as this is the default for the title field.

Special Operators

If you are familiar with some of the major engines, then you may have come across the + and - options. You can use these to tell our search system which words or phrases should or should not be included. For example, the search for "web programming" and not (activex or java) above could also be written as +"web programming" -activex -java; all products containing the phrase web programming in the appropriate field will be found that don't have the words activex and java in the same field.

Note about operators: you can mix these operators if you wish. For example, the search "web programming" and activex -java will return items with web programming and activex in them, but not java.

Wildcards

If you are not able to find what you are looking for, you can adjust the search by using wildcards in one or more of the text fields;

• * - the asterisk can be used to represent 0 or more single characters
• ? - the question mark can be used to represent a single character

Results Navigation

The results will only show up to 25 titles, sorted by published date with the newest first. You can navigate the results using the Select page links at the top and bottom of the table.

• [First] - will jump to the first page of results
• [Prev] - show the previous page of results
• [Next] - show the next page of results
• [Last] - jump to the last page of results
• 1 | 2 | 3 etc. - click on the number to jump to that particular page. The bold number is the current page.
• ... - use these when there are more than 10 pages of results to view more page numbers; the ... at the left of the page numbers will show the next set of pages numbers below the current page, the one at the right will show the next set of pages above the current one.

Narrowing Your Search

Once you have searched for something, you may find that there are too many items to look through. If you want to narrow your search, you can choose These results only from the drop down menu under the search box in the top menu, enter some more search words in the search box, and click on Go (or press the Enter key). You can do this repeatedly, so you can gradually narrow your search to just the items you want.

Additional Notes

Where words can be entered to search for in the contents that are available for some of the titles, those words will also be looked for in the titles as well. It is therefore a good idea not to enter the same words in the contents and title fields as this will duplicate some of the searching.

With the ISBN field you can enter more than one value. You can also use wildcards in ISBN's.

With the Reference field, you can enter BookFellas' six digit codes. As with ISBN's, you can enter as many as you want and use wildcards.