Fuzzy Searching

Fuzzy searching helps you to find words when you are not sure of their spelling, or you know how a word sounds but there are several possible ways of spelling it. It finds words that you could not find by using wild cards. Fuzzy searching inserts, deletes and substitutes characters while Justis attemps to find words that are similar to the one that you specified.

To tell Justis that you want a fuzzy search, add a tilde at the end of your word.

You will probably find some irrelevant documents among the results, because Justis is likely to find words that you did not anticipate. You can use fuzzy searching with numbers, but this is not likely to produce helpful results. You can also use fuzzy searching to find words with and without diacritics, but you will normally get better results by using the OR operator, for example Muller or Müller or Mueller.

You can specify the precision that Justis will apply when it tries to find words that are similar to the one you provide. A precision of 1 will find only your word. A precision of 0 will find huge numbers of variations. The default (if you do not specify a number) is 0.5.

To give you an idea of what fuzzy searching can do, searching the Parties field for Smith~ finds words including:

Beith	Keith	Shish	Smirk	Smiths	Stitt
Blith	Leith	Sitch	Smit	Smiton	Styth
Brith	Mieth	Sith	Smith	Smits	Suite
Edith	Reith	Skitt	Smitham	Smyth	Suits
Erith	Roith	Sleith	Smithby	Smythe	Switch
Faith	Salth	Smeth	Smithe	Smyths	Swith
Frith	Sarth	Smidt	Smither	Snaith	Voith
Haith	Seath	Smidth	Smithey	Stich

Fuzzy searching works best in small, named fields such as Parties. It may find huge numbers of documents on the Quick Search screen, in the Full Text boxes, and in large, named fields such as Judgment. In extreme cases, Justis will display a message asking you to make your search more precise.

Even in a small, named field, specifying too low a precision can cause problems. For example, in the Parties field:

would find a huge number of documents, and so Justis will not attempt to display the results of your search. Please specify a higher precision.