GALLOPP - Portal Search Help:

GALLOPP indexes full-text and bibliographic content from the electronic government documents collections of 10 Canadian jurisdictions (see scope note for full content details).

Basic Search

Type in a word or words you want to search for. This search will find words in all fields of the record. You may use the following conventions to search:

  • word searching: table mountain
  • truncation: mount*
  • phrase searching: "table mountain"
  • boolean near: "table mountain" ~10 - i.e. 'table' within 10 words of 'mountain'
  • boolean AND: table AND mountain
  • boolean NOT: table NOT mountain

GALLOPP search also allows 'Fuzzy' searching on terms. The Fuzzy search attempts to broaden your search by allowing the search by finding words spelled nearly the same as the ones you entered. For example a Fuzzy search on "Macdonald" might return records with "McDonald" and "Macdonalds" as well. A Fuzzier search adds variations like "Donald." To apply fuzzy searching type your query term followed by a tilde and the degree of 'fuzziness' between 0.1 and 0.9, with 0.1 being the most 'fuzzy' search (i.e. likely to return the most results) and 0.9 being the least fuzzy.

e.g. Macdonald~0.7

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search page allows fielded searches to be made:

  • All Fields; terms in this field may appear in any of the records fields, including the full-text
  • Citation Text: search for your terms in any of the citation fields (title author subject)
  • Source: narrow your search to one or more jurisdictions. To select multiple jurisdictions, hold down the ctrl key and click on the jurisdictions you wish to select
  • Language: select the language of the records you want to search for. The language selection is based on the language indicated in the original catalogue record.
  • Author: search for the author / authoring body
  • Sort: you can choose the have the results sorted in relevance or title order.

Search Results

Ranking:

By default, the results are returned in ranked order. The ranking is based on a hierarchy of where the terms appear and how often the terms appear. The appearance of the term in the citation fields (title, author, subject) makes the record rank higher than multiple occurrences of the term in the full-text of the item. All else being equal, an item with 10 occurrences of the terms will rank higher than one with 8 occurrences in the full text.

Full text:

The full text snippet is drawn from the first 350,000 characters (~46,000 words) so if your term appears after that in the document being searched it will not be highlighted in the results display, even though the term exists in the retrieved document.

A note on dates:

The date field is derived from the original catalogue record. In the case of serials, the date may not reflect the date of the publication represented by the record. Sorting by date has therefore been eliminated.