How to Search

Any search engine has to decide how strictly or liberally to interpret what counts as a match for the search string entered by the user. The following describes how the Landscapes of Injustice search engine works and how to modify that behaviour to match the user's needs or expectations.

A search string must be at least three characters long. Very common three letter words, for example 'the' and 'and' are ignored.

The engine returns up to seventy five results that match the search string. If there are more matches, a Show More button and a Show All button appear at the end of the seventy five results.

All searches except exact words/phrases are case insensitive. For example, a search string of fish and a search string of Fish return the same results.

The search engine is word-oriented, which means a string of letters which happens to appear in a grammatically unrelated word will not usually match, even if that word is semantically related. For example the search string fish matches 'fishes' and 'fishing' but does not match 'fisheries' nor 'dogfish'.

To overcome the default behaviour described above or tell the search engine what to do more precisely, use the special characters and punctuation marks described below.

There are over 50,000 instances of a name identified in the collection. It is difficult to determine whether each instance of a name refers to the same person as each other instance of that name, or refers to a different person. Where feasible, we have identified multiple instance of the same name with the same person. In the majority of cases, however, we have not been able to determine whether the names refer to the same or different persons. Any instance of a name may refer to the same person in different documents but could also refer to different people with the same name. Because we cannot verify this information, we leave this task to the researching community.

The rules detailed below apply to names as to any other words. For examples:

The search string Mary Kitigawa matches 'Mary' or 'Kitigawa' or both, so returns the most results, but likely many that have nothing to do with Mary Kitigawa.

The search string +Mary +Kitigawa matches if both 'Mary' and 'Kitigawa' are on the page, so returns fewer results but likely about Mary Kitigawa or members of her family.

The search string "Mary Kitigawa" matches the exact phrase "Mary Kitigawa" (case sensitive), so returns the fewest results but almost certainly about Mary Kitigawa.

The search string -Mary Kitigawa matches pages that contain 'Kitigawa' but do not contain "Mary", so pages about people whose name is Kitigawa that do not mention Mary.

The search engine automatically matches grammatical variants of verbs and nouns. For example the search string dog matches 'dog' or 'dogs'; the search string fish matches 'fish', 'fishes' and 'fishing'.

The search engine does not automatically match a small search string to a larger compound or derived word. For example the search string fish does not match 'fisher' or 'fisherman'.

To return exactly the word in the search string and no variants, put quotation marks around the word. For example the search string "fish" matches only the word 'fish', not 'fishes', 'fishing' etc.. Note that searches using quotation marks are case-sensitive, so search strings "fish" and "Fish" return different matches.

To match any of two or more words, enter the words. For example the search string dog salmon matches if 'dog' OR 'salmon' or both are in the page.

To match all of two or more words, put a + before each word that must be matched. For example +dog +salmon is a match if both 'dog' and 'salmon' are in the page.

To exclude matches put a - before each word that must not be matched. For example, the search string dog -salmon matches 'dog', but excludes any that also contain 'salmon'.

To match a word followed by exactly one letter, put a ? after the search string. For example the search string dog? matches 'dogi' and 'dogs' but does not match 'dog'.

To match a word followed by any number of letters, put a * after the search string. For example, the search string don* matches 'donkey', 'done' and many others.

To match a word preceded by exactly one letter, put a ? before the search string. For example, the search string ?don matches 'udon' but not 'pardon'.

To match a word preceded by any number of letters, put a * before the search string. For example, the search string *don matches 'udon', 'pardon', 'London' and many others.

To match a word containing one of a list of alternate letters (known as character classes), put the alternate letters inside square brackets. For example the search string [dw]ish matches 'dish' and 'wish', but not 'fish'.

The wild card operators may be combined. For example *fish* matches 'fish', 'fisheries', 'dogfish' and many others.

To match an exact phrase, put quotation marks around the phrase. For example "fish and chip" matches the exact phrase 'fish and chip', and does not match 'fish and chips'.

The exact phrase search is case-sensitive, So "fish" and "Fish" match differently.

Exact phrases may not include any of the other special punctuation marks.