The following text is meant to help users searching the full text of hamletworks.org. Note: the illustrative examples below are links to live searches of the entries. Feel free to try them out.

The full text search engine used for hamletworks.org is a customized version of Hunter, an XML-aware engine developed by Alternative Output Inc. In the present implementation, the search engine supports fielded keyword, proximity, and phrase searches of the full texts of hamletworks.org.

All searches in Hunter are case insensitive. Thus searches for Student, student, or stuDEnt all return the same results.

Right truncation is the default, but users can specify a word form by adding a space after the search string. A search for 'john ' will only find "john" but a search for 'john' without the trailing space will find "john", "john1", "john2", and "johnson". Similarly a search for 'shakespeare ' will find texts containing "shakespeare" or "Shakespeare" as an exact match, a search for 'shakes' will find "Shakespeare", "Shakespere", "Shakespear", "Shakespearean", and "Shakespearian".

Hunter supports a rich set of proximity operators, including

near

(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters of string2)

before

(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters before string2)

after

(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters after string2)

notnear

(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters of string2)

notbefore

(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters before string2)

notafter

(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters after string2)

The default proximity is 80 characters, but may be reset using the proximity pull-down menu in the search form. Here is an example of Ophelia near Polonius with the default proximity of 80 and the sample size set to 160 so that the hits will display on the screen. Here is Ophelia near Polonius with the proximity set to 160 and sample size set to 160 characters. Other multiword search terms are treated as phrases. Note the difference between hamlet near horatio. and hamlet and horatio. Note also the difference between Rosencrantz and Rosencrantz notnear Guildenstern.

There are various ways to restrict the results of searches. The user may choose to limit a search by collection (e.g., only Context Notes) or by a field within the text (e.g. Authors' Names). All collections and fields are searched by default. Using the field selection pull-down menu at the top left,

The default behavior is to generate a list of texts containing matches for the search string and a KWIC (KeyWord In Context) concordance with a user-selected sample size of the hits on each page. Users may turn off the KWIC concordance by setting the sample size to "0". The size of the concordance display may also be expanded or contracted using the links at the top of the display page. The user may view the hits in a particular text by clicking the links above the display of hits for each entry.