Please spend some time familiarizing yourself with the terms-and-connectors (TNC) search operators to use the system effectively. TNC search systems are designed to help you find proverbial needles in haystacks. Alternatively, you can
Keywords and Root Expanders
All searches are case-insensitive. Singulars and plurals are not stemmed automatically, meaning complete won't match completed.
Use a root-expander ! at the end of a word root to match spelling variations. For example: transc! matches transcribe, transcript, and transcription.
Precedence and Logical Connectors
Expressions evaluate left-to-right unless grouped by parentheses. Supported operators include:
- Parentheses ( ): Groups expressions together.
- Proximity /n: Terms match if they appear within n words of each other. Example: breach /3 contract
- Ordered Proximity +n: Left term must precede the right term by at most n words. Example: strict +2 liability
- Windowed Exclusion -/n: Keeps matches only if the excluded word is NOT within n words. Example: breach -/5 contract
- Document Conjunction AND: Both terms must exist in the document.
- Document Disjunction OR: Matches if either term is present. Any space between words without a connector acts as an implicit OR.
- Global Exclusion NOT: Disqualifies the entire document if the term exists anywhere inside it. Must be used at the very end of your query. Example: (apple /5 orange) NOT banana
Inherent Stopwords
To optimize the client-side search cache size (which is extremely small and loads instantly in the browser), single-character alphabetical and punctuation tokens (e.g. a, i) are not indexed, as well as common English stopwords (e.g. the, and).
Single-digit numbers (e.g. 5, 0) are fully indexed. Stopwords are shown with a strikethrough in your parsed query feedback.
Special Reserved Tokens
- NUMBER: Matches numbers (e.g. "ten", "10,341", "1997").
- MONEY: Matches monetary values (e.g. "$150", "fifty dollars").
- DATE: Matches dates including a month (e.g. "January 14, 2007", "April 15").
- >>: Matches dialogue turns in conversation transcripts.
Updating Search Cache When Re-Indexing
When the archive is re-indexed, the index is identified with a hash.
The search page automatically reads this hash from the server on page load, compares it against the local IndexedDB database, and invalidates/downloads fresh listings automatically if the hash differs. No manual cache clearing is required.