Bertrand Russell Find-a-Text
Need some help?
Welcome to the Bertrand Russell Find-a-Text!
This search engine is designed to search through the works of Bertrand Russell for terms of interest, and to return a ranked list of articles or book chapters that contain the most relevant results.
Two types of searches are possible.
1. Simple Search (recommended): Type in a query and press enter to search. You can use simple english to search, and we use smart features in the background to give the most plausible results. A simple search is not case sensitive, and the search engine will attempt to find closely related words.
Format: query
(Just type in a query and press enter)
Examples:
Word1 Word2 Word3
Word4
2. Direct Search: This search looks for the exact query you type in. It does not use any smart features in the background. It is important to type in the exact query you are looking for, as simple differences in capitalization or spelling will result in no or incorrect results being
Format: !direct query
Examples:
!direct Word1 Word2 Word3
!direct Word1
Note: The full query is searched as a whole. Words inside the query are not searched individually. Therefore, when using this search, result quality is higher for single words than for multiple words.
Other commands:
!help - Display this help message
Four logical terms may be used: and, or, xor, not. These act like filters.
To find articles with words "word1" and "word2", simply type:
("word1" and "word2")
To find articles with either "word3" or "word4", exclusively:
("word3" xor "word4")
To find articles with either "word3" or "word4", inclusively:
("word3" or "word4")
To find articles that have both "word1" and "word2" in them but also one of "word3" or "word4" exclusively, we can enter the query as:
("word1" and "word2"); ("word3" xor "word4")
If we wanted to exclude "word5" from the results, we can add a 'not' filter:
("word1" and "word2"); ("word3" xor "word4"); (not "word5")
To also remove the word "word6" from the results, simply add another 'not' filter:
("word1" and "word2"); ("word3" xor "word4"); (not "word5"); (not "word6")
There is no limit to how many filters you can apply or in what order you apply them. However, each filter is applied on the filtered articles from the previous filter. So, if the first filter you apply selects 50% of the articles, the next filter in line will only be applied to that 50% of the articles, not the entire dataset.
More Complex Queries
Queries with nested brackets can be used to search the dataset.
Examples:
(("word1" and "word2") or "word9")
("word9" or ("word1" and "word2"))
(("word1" and "word2") not "word6")
("word6" xor ("word1" and "word2"))
(("word1" and "word3") or ("word2" and "word8"))
NOTE: Only one sub-query depth is supported. Therefore, queries in the format "((( "" op "" ) op "") op "") or similar are not supported.
NOTE: Filters are combined using a semi-colon for better readablity. Therefore, ("word1" and "word2") ("word3" xor "word4") will now be ("word1" and "word2"); ("word3" xor "word4").
You can use these nested queries along with other filters. There is no limit to how many filters you can apply (other than a 255 character limit for security purposes).