Searching in Smart Search
Question: When I use Smart Search I get too many results. How can I find what I’m looking for without scrolling through page after page of seemingly irrelevant results?
Answer: Smart Search is designed to provide you with information from a variety of sources. To zero in on specific information or sources, you can do a broad search (the default search) and then narrow the results down to what you’re looking for or you can refine your search up front.
If you are looking for information about a topic doing a broad, default search, Smart Search will provide you with links to a lot of information. The default search looks for all items that contain the words in your search string in any order, anywhere in the record. After the results are returned, you can focus in on the types of information you are looking for by using the Refine My Results facets on the right side of the result page. Are you looking for only online resources? Follow the online resources link under the Top Level facet to limit the result set to those resources that are available online. Do you want to narrow your search results to only German language videos? Use the Language and the Genre/Form facets. The numbers in parenthesis indicate how many records you’ll see if you refine by a particular facet.
If you are looking for a specific title, author, topic or format when you do a search, change the Limit to: options that can be found directly under the search box. You can specify a particular format (books, journals, images, maps, music scores, etc.) You can specify that the words you use in your search simply be in the record somewhere in any order, or you can change it to “with my exact phrase” and only look for the words in the order that you typed them. And finally, you can change where the system will look for your search words within the record from “anywhere in the record” to specifically look at just the title, or just an author/creator, or in the table of contents (TOC), etc.
