OCW Course Finder^BETA

Variation Search

Our Variation Search takes the query you enter and attempts to optimize your terms to produce quality results. It has been designed to produce highly effective searches without the need to understand the advanced syntax behind it. We will look for variations of the word as well as the root word itself, so you don't have to choose the perfect term to find what you need.

In the Variation Search there are two advanced capabilities available for you to further control the results you receive.

One is the wildcard or "begins with" search. You can look for partial matches on a word by using the "*" (asterisk or star). In the example below, it would find "math", "mathematics", "mathematician", etc.

The other is a phrase search. You can use quotes to surround multiple words to find that exact phrase, as in the example below.

Our Course Finder is powered by the Zend Framework's Lucene Search which is based on the original Apache Lucene project. We see it is another example of the great work being produced by the Open Source Software community. This work enables organizations who operate on limited budgets to accomplish the goals which continue to drive the advancement of humanity around the globe.

Exact Search

Our search engine utilizes the Zend Lucene project, which is based on the Apache Lucene project. Advanced searchers can utilize the special query language of Lucene to achieve highly targetted results. If you are interested in learning more about how to construct your own advanced search queries, please visit the sites of either project.

• Apache Lucene query language reference
• Zend Lucene query language reference (mainly explains what is different from the Java version)

A few common examples of how the syntax works:

The "+" (plus sign) placed at the beginning of a word tells Lucene that it is required. In the example below, only results containing the word "math" will be returned. Our search is not case sensitive, but in this example it would only find "math" as an individual word, but would not find "mathematics".

The "-" (plus sign) placed at the beginning of a word tells Lucene that a result should be excluded if this word is found. In the example below, only results containing the word "math", but not containing "algebra" will be returned.

Note: If you do not use one of these symbols then all the terms will be treated as an OR type search, meaning that results will be returned if any of the terms are found.

You can use quotes to surround multiple words to find that exact phrase, as in the example below.

You can use the links above to learn more about how to create advanced queries for this and other Lucene-based search engines.