Justis FAQs – How do I find a word that I don’t know how to spell?

Sometimes you have heard a name, but you know that there is more than one way to spell it. Or you know that a word may or may not include diacritics (accents). Perhaps you do know how to spell a word, but you suspect that other people may have used different spellings. Or you want to do an exhaustive search that will include spelling mistakes.

Justis provides several ways to help you find words when you are not sure which spellings and diacritics have been used, including the OR search operator, suggestions, wild cards and fuzzy searching.

OR operator

If you are confident that you know all of the possible spelling variations of a name or a word, then you can use the OR search operator:

This operator will find all of the documents that contain one or more of your alternatives.

For more information, view the Help.

Suggestions

As soon as you have typed 4 characters, Justis can offer up to 10 suggestions of complete words that are present in its indexes. As you type more characters, the suggestions become more specific. To use one of the suggested terms in your search, just click it.

You can turn suggestions on or off from either the Quick Search screen or the Search Preferences section of the My Justis tab.

For more information, view the Help.

Wild cards

Justis offers you 3 wild cards:

• question mark, which represents any single character;
• asterisk, which represents any number of characters (including zero);
• hyphen, which represents an actual hyphen or a space or no space between 2 words.

You can use a question mark wild card in your search terms to match both plain and accented letters:

You can use an asterisk wild card in your search terms to match zero or more letters:

Alternatively, you can use wild cards to generate suggestions, and select the ones that you want:

You can use a hyphen wild card in your search to match terms that may have been written as one word, two words, or hyphenated:

For more information, view the Help.

Fuzzy searching

Fuzzy searching inserts, deletes and substitutes characters while Justis attempts to find words in its indexes that are similar to the one that you specified. In addition to spelling variations and presence or absence of diacritics, fuzzy searches can help to include typing errors in your results, such as transposed characters, missing characters, duplicated characters and adjacent characters on the keyboard.

To tell Justis to perform a fuzzy search, add a tilde to the end of your search term.

Optionally, 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.

You can use the suggest function with a tilde in order to select only the variations that you want:

For more information, view the Help.

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11th December 2007