Tips for searching

Here are a few tips for searching to help you find the information you are looking for in AGDA.

  1. Use the keywords most relevant to your search, e.g. United Arab Emirates
  2. Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases, e.g. "United Arab Emirates"
  3. Searching without quotations marks will match each word individually e.g. United Arab Emirates will return more results than "United Arab Emirates", although documents matching all three words will appear closer to the top of the results list.
  4. You can perform wildcard searches by using an asterisk '*' (e.g. tele* will match documents containing telegram, telephone and telegraphic).

The following advanced search operators are also available:

  1. Boolean operators: "united OR union AND arab emirates"
  2. Fuzzy search is useful for locating names or other words prone to being misspelt. Fuzzy search works by finding all matching terms with a maximum of two changes from the search query. For example: untied~kingdom will return search results for united kingdom
  3. You can find items in the archive using the catalogue reference (e.g. "FO 371/168917" will return a result for that specific set of documents).
  4. Searches in English or Arabic will deliver identical results regardless of the language of the interface.