Advanced Search Tips

Advanced Search Tips

There are three unique ways to search on the Competition Tribunal website. You may search via the search box present on all pages, search via search criteria or search via keyword filter on the advanced search page. Below is a detailed explanation on the various search query styles available to you.

Regular Search Query Syntax

To search in a regular manner just enter your keyword or phrase into any search box e.g. "hello world".

Boolean Search Query Syntax

Boolean queries allow the following special operators to be used. You can enter these queries into any search box:

Explicit operator AND:

Example: hello & world

The AND operator allows you to search for any documents containing all words joined with the & symbol.

Operator OR:

Example: hello | world

The OR operator allows you to search for any documents containing any of the words joined with the | symbol.

Operator NOT:

Example: hello -world or hello !world

The NOT operator allows you to exclude words prefixed with - or ! from your search.

Grouping: ( hello world )

Extended Search Query Syntax

The following special operators and modifiers can be used when using the extended matching mode:

Field search operator:

Example: @title hello @summary world

The field serach operator "@" allows you to search a specific field for the desired keywords.
(Available fields include: title, type, status, number (this is the case number), applicant, respondent, summary, keywords, source)

Field position limit modifier:

Example: @title[50] hello

Field position limit additionaly restricts the searching to first N position within given field (or fields). For example, "@body[50] hello" will not match the documents where the keyword 'hello' occurs at position 51 and below in the body.

Multiple-field search operator:

Example: (@title,@summary) hello world

The multiple-field search operator allows you to search multiple specific fields for the desired keywords.

All-field search operator:

Example: @* hello

The all-field search operator allows you to search all fields for the desired keywords.

Phrase search operator:

Example: "hello world"

The phrase search operator allows you to search for any complete phrase within the search indexes.

Proximity search operator:

Example: "hello world"~10

Proximity distance is specified in words, adjusted for word count, and applies to all words within quotes. For instance, "cat dog mouse"~5 query means that there must be less than 8-word span which contains all 3 words, ie. "CAT aaa bbb ccc DOG eee fff MOUSE" document will not match this query, because this span is exactly 8 words long.

Quorum matching operator:

Example: "this is a decided case"/3

Quorum matching operator introduces a kind of fuzzy matching. It will only match those documents that pass a given threshold of given words. The example above ("this is a decided case"/3) will match all documents that have at least 3 of the 5 specified words.

Strict order operator (aka operator "before"):

Example: hello << this << world

Strict order operator (aka operator "before") will match the document only if its argument keywords occur in the document exactly in the query order. For instance, "black << cat" query (without quotes) will match the document "black and white cat" but not the "that cat was black" document. Order operator has the lowest priority. It can be applied both to just keywords and more complex expressions, ie. this is a valid query:

Exact form modifier:

Example: raining =cats and =dogs

Exact form keyword modifier will match the document only if the keyword occurred in exactly the specified form. The default behaviour is to match the document if the stemmed keyword matches. For instance, "runs" query will match both the document that contains "runs" and the document that contains "running", because both forms stem to just "run" - while "=runs" query will only match the first document. Exact form operator requires index_exact_words option to be enabled. This is a modifier that affects the keyword and thus can be used within operators such as phrase, proximity, and quorum operators.

Field-start and field-end modifier:

Example: ^hello world$

Field-start and field-end keyword modifiers will make the keyword match only if it occurred at the very start or the very end of a fulltext field, respectively. For instance, the query "^hello world$" (with quotes and thus combining phrase operator and start/end modifiers) will only match documents that contain at least one field that has exactly these two keywords.