We are very pleased to announce a new feature on PEP-Web: Quick Search!
The new Quick Search field allows you to perform word and phrase searches of document content without first going to the search tab. It’s available at all times at the top of the PEP-Web page, right above our banner. The menu from that position has been moved to the left side of the page. Just click in the field, type your search, and press enter! Or click the search icon in the field.
[2021 Note: The new PEP-Web does not have a quick search (always available) field, but has a SmartSearch field instead which has even more functionality, and is available in most views, other than Read. In the 2021 release, since the underlying search engine has changed, we’ve added the equivalent search syntax and some explanatory notes.]
The new Quick Search works just the same as the “Search for Words or Phrases in Context” box on the Search Tab. The name “Quick Search” is not meant to imply that the searches are faster–instead it means access to it is more convenient, and you can quickly try several different terms without clicking to select the field again and again. And like the word search area of the search tab, by using advanced search syntax, you can do very advanced searches.
So, for example, you can do these types of searches, right from the Quick Search field:
| Search Text (pre-2021 new platform launch) | Search Text (post-2021 new platform launch) | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| transference and countertransference | transference AND countertransference | Both words must be present |
| transference or countertransference | transference OR countertransference | Either word can be present |
| transference and not countertransference | transference AND NOT countertransference | Only transference must be present |
| transference w/5 countertransference | 'transference countertransference'~5 | Transference must occur within 5 words of countertransference |
| apply~ | apply~2 | Pre-2021 new platform launch: Search for apply or other forms of the word, including applied, applies. This is known as “Word Stemming” Post-2021 new platform launch: No true Stem search. The number specifies the number of differences allowed in the term search. You can also type the root of the word and use "*", e.g., appl*, though that brings other word meanings in as well. |
| ~anger | Select the "Match Synonyms" checkbox in the search form. | Use the PEP Thesaurus to expand anger with it's synonyms and search for matches to any of them. |
Note also that it will keep your previous searches for you, in your browser’s session memory, so that you can quickly recall a prior search term or phrase. The list will appear as soon as you start typing in the field.
While developing this feature, we fixed a few “search bugs that had snuck into PEP-Web! The word stemming and thesaurus features of our search interface had become problematic, but they have now been fixed. One of the problems was that the thesaurus operator which was “&”, was no longer being detected correctly. We’ve opted to change that to a tilde (“~”) at the beginning of a word, which is consistent with Google search syntax. The stemming operator–which searches various forms of the same word–remains the same, a tilde (“~”) at the end of the word. Moving the thesaurus operator to the beginning of the word also means that these can be combined and those can be combined with the other advanced search syntax as well.
We know how important search is to PEP-Web users, and we wanted to make sure searches were as convenient as possible. We hope you find it helpful!