Place name search

[jdsh]

I had expected that a broad match place name search looking for "PRV" would return all instances where the word "PRV" occurred in the site name. In fact it only returns those where "PRV" occurs at the beginning of the site name. I'm not sure whether this is a bug, or whether there is an alternative means of doing the search. Given the very wide range of styles for site names it is quite essential to be able to do searches for a part of the site name. The user manual isn't much help on the subject and omits place name searches completely.

Jon Shanklin

[admin]

Hi Jonathan,

'Broad matching' attempts to normalise names down to significant distinct keywords, removing many qualifying keywords that might otherwise cause matches to fail, e.g.

Ashwell
Ashwell cemetery
East of Ashwell
Ashwell, E of

would all match the keyword 'Ashwell'


'Narrow Matching' uses the original text of name, with an implicit wildcard character after and the option of using a '%' wildcard to match other parts of the sequence, e.g. of the 'Ashwell' variants above

Ashwell
Ashwell cemetery
Ashwell, E of

would match the keyword 'Ashwell'

The cemetery could be found using a search for 'Ashwell cemetery' (whereas for a broad search this would return all the results as 'cemetery' would be stripped out of the filter).

For your search a narrow match on '%PRV' would probably give the results that you're after.

[jdsh]

Thanks Tom - would it be possible to document these features in the user manual - as far as I can see there is no mention of place name searches or the use of wildcards.

Jon