Search operators on WOL

[carlos]

On your Watchtower Library on DVD you can use search operators such as * & | and so on. This gives you a lot of flexibility to fine-tune your searches. If you are interested in those, you can have a look at these threads:

https://jwtalk.net/topic/35811-advanced-search-in-watchtower-library/

https://jwtalk.net/topic/37566-watchtower-online-library-tips-and-tricks/

 

My question is: Do you know if there is a way to use similar operators on WOL? I tried to search for paragraphs containing both "king" and "forever" but it will find all paragraphs that contain any of those terms. "king & forever" doesn't make a difference. "king AND forever" is much worse because it will also find the paragraphs that contain "and". There is no way to do this search in WOL?

 

If not, that's an additional reason to keep using Watchtower Library on DVD.

[Bek]

Br. Carlos, please try "king"&"forever". It will find occurrences of both words in the same context. 

 

 

Edited September 3, 2019 by Hun

[carlos]

Thanks, Nurzat. I'm afraid that's not working for me.

 

If I use "king"&"forever" it doesn't find any hit. If I remove the quotation marks, like this king&forever, it has 660 hits, but the first one, for example, is Daniel 2:2, which contains "king" twice but no "forever".

[Bek]

When I use "king"&"forever", I get 660 hits with search set to "located in the same paragraph" and when I adjust the search settings to "located in the same sentence", I still get 362 hits. You can also adjust the search settings to "located in the same article", in which case you will get 2418 hits. 

 

Here is a link to my 660 search results: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/s/r1/lp-e?q="king" %26 "forever"

 

Here is a link to Daniel 2, which mentions both "king" and "forever": https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/b/r1/lp-e/nwtsty/E/2019/27/2?q="king"+%26+"forever"&p=par#study=discover 

 

 

Edited September 3, 2019 by Hun

[Brandon]

I don't have any windows machines.  Can you share a screenshot of the WT 'offline' library's search results for your example?  I'm having a hard time picturing the differences you speak of.

 

I mean in theory I can imagine that having different operators such as boolean, etc. could affect what information is readily surface, I can't imagine the results would be that different 🤔

 

How many operators does the offline library have?

[Beggar for the Spirit]

Hi Brandon, 

I hope this is helpful, this is from the WT Library CD

Quote

*** wtlib-help section 4 ***
Search Operators
&        And operation
+        And operation
Space    As specified in the Search menu
|         Or operation
/        Or operation
ˆ        Exclusive Or operation
%        Exclusive Or operation
!        Not operation
&!, +!     Not operation
&-, +-    Not operation
&&       Adjacent And operation
++       Adjacent And operation
“...”       Searches for the phrase that is enclosed in quotes
*        Represents one or more characters (including nothing)
?        Represents one character in a word
#number  Allows searching for words using their word ID number
\        Forces the following operator to be a literal character
(...)       Allow for setting precedence

Examples:

Quote

Jesus & Christ
Finds all documents that contain both words within the specified scope.
Jesus | Christ
Finds all documents that contain either word.
Jesus && Christ
Finds all documents that contain the word Jesus followed by the word Christ.
“Jesus Christ”
Finds all documents that contain the exact phrase Jesus Christ.
Jesus ˆ Christ
Finds all documents that contain either word, but not where both words occur in the specified scope.
Christian*
Finds all documents that contain words that begin with “Christian” followed by any additional characters (words such as Christian, Christians, Christianity).
Organi?ation
Finds all documents that contain words with 12 letters, where the first 6 letters are “Organi” and the last 5 letters are “ation” (words such as Organization, Organisation).
Jesus | Christ & Jehovah
Finds all documents that contain either Jesus or Christ, and then further limits the results by finding only the documents in that group that also include Jehovah in the specified scope.
Jesus | (Christ & Jehovah)
Finds all documents that contain Christ and Jehovah in the specified scope. It then searches again for all documents that contain Jesus and adds them to the results.
Jesus ! Christ
Finds all documents that contain the word Jesus without the word Christ in the specified scope.

 

Edited September 3, 2019 by Beggar for the Spirit

[Brandon]

I think I'll stick to the publications index...

[Thesauron]

I think I'll stick to the publications index...

It is included in the WOL, and any searches you makes searches the Index as well as the Research Guide. Everything to help you become a better Bible student.

[jayrtom]

@carlos the only workaround I know of is to use google and put "site:wol.jw.org/en" first and then your search criteria after that

 

site:wol.jw.org/en "kings" AND "forever"

[jayrtom]

I've searched a little bit more and here it is an easier way to use google to search wol

 

Go to chrome settings

 

Scroll down until you see the Search Engines category, and click on “Manage Search Engines.”

 

Click “Add” next to the Other Search Engines header.

 

On the window that shows up, write on the 3 available fiels exactly what is shown

 

The 3rd field is this text bellow. write exactly what is there (you can only change the "en" part to whatever language you want)

You can add more than one language if you repeat the above actions but changing the shortcut name to other things, like for example wol-en, wol-pt, wol-it .......

 

Quote

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS439US439&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site:wol.jw.org/en+%s

 

After everything doe, when you want to search on wol you just have to write this part on the google url bar

 

wol <search term>

 

on the aforementioned example we would write this:

 

wol kings AND forever

[jayrtom]

One added bonus of this method, and that doesn't exist on the DVD Library, is that google does spelling check and correction 👍

 

It works great to finding images too (only on wol)

Edited September 4, 2019 by jayrtom

[jayrtom]

With this method you can also restrict your search to the bible

 

Create a new search 

On the shortcut put the name "bible"

On the special string put exactly this:

 

Quote

 

Then you just need to put this on google, with search operators and spell checking

 

bible <search criteria>

 

It works also on the images to show only images from the study bible

Edited September 4, 2019 by jayrtom
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS439US439&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/b/r1/lp-e/nwtsty/E/2019/+%s

[MCTDonna]

I'am going to try this

I prefer the dvd but maybe this will change my mind

[carlos]

3 hours ago, jayrtom said:

@carlos the only workaround I know of is to use google and put "site:wol.jw.org/en" first and then your search criteria after that

site:wol.jw.org/en "kings" AND "forever"

Thank you, João. I hadn't thought of using Google to search WOL or create a search engine shortcut. Those are great ideas!

Anyway it's strange that search operators are not supported when they are included in Watchtower Library for many years.

 

16 hours ago, Brandon said:

I don't have any windows machines.  Can you share a screenshot of the WT 'offline' library's search results for your example?  I'm having a hard time picturing the differences you speak of.

Sure! There is a big difference between searching paragraphs that contain both "king" and "forever" and searching paragraphs that contain any of those terms. The second search will give many more hits and most of them won't be relevant to the information you are looking for.

 

In Watchtower Library, when you search two words it understands you want paragraphs that contain both. That is, searching for "king forever" (without the quotation marks) is the same as searching for "king & forever". These are the results.

 

 

 

 

And these are the results when you search for paragraphs that contain any of those terms. This is the kidn of search that WOL does:

 

 

[Old]

When searching WTLibrary for specific application I find it advantagous to use sentence scope as the both words have some relation to each other in sentence structure. A paragraph scope search just means they are in the same paragraph and may or may not have a bearing on each other. They can become even more divergent in 'article scope'.

I 

[Beggar for the Spirit]

9 hours ago, carlos said:

Anyway it's strange that search operators are not supported when they are included in Watchtower Library for many years

Hi Carlos, 

If you look back at Johan and Nurzat's posts, they both confirm that the same "Search Operators" can be used on WOL.

When I typed in the same search operators on WOL as I did with WT Library CD, it worked.

 

WT Library CD:  I typed king & forever(Result: 889 using "sentence scope")

WOL: I typed king & forever (Result: 362 using "sentence scope")

WOL: I typed king && forever (Result: 92 using "sentence scope") The && finds all documents that contain the word king followed by the word forever.
 

I think there is more literature in the WT Library CD and it therefore got more results than WOL, another reason I like to use the CD.

But to get 362 and 92 results on WOL means that it accepted the search operators.

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by Beggar for the Spirit

[jwhess]

It was interesting that king & forever gave the results stated in the posts above.  Using the + sign instead of & gave the same results.  And using && gave the 92 (actually 94 for me) results that Neil said.  But using ++ did not.  It simply reverted to the 362 locations.  Strange...😎

[Beggar for the Spirit]

Does anyone know what this Search Operator means:

Quote

*** wtlib-help section 4 ***
#number  Allows searching for words using their word ID number

So for example:

I typed #100 and the result was a Hebrew word עוד (from a 1962 article only)

I typed #50 and the result was a symbol ⇨ (found in only 1 article in g12)

So apparently many or all symbols and Hebrew words have a designated ID number?

But who designates a word ID number? And there must a be a big list of all these word ID numbers somewhere right? 

Maybe these are from a Concordance?  

 

[jwhess]

Could they be numbered entries in the Insight books?  I typed #3999 and it brought up 10 reference in the Publication Index and 2 Reference in the Insight Book.

In every case, when you selected the reference listed and checked the highlighted choice, it took you to the Insight Vol 2 page 1088-1089 in the subject of "Castration".

 

When I have some time, I will check other numbers.

[1MKnight]

On 9/4/2019 at 4:54 PM, Beggar for the Spirit said:

Does anyone know what this Search Operator means:

So for example:

I typed #100 and the result was a Hebrew word עוד (from a 1962 article only)

I typed #50 and the result was a symbol ⇨ (found in only 1 article in g12)

So apparently many or all symbols and Hebrew words have a designated ID number?

But who designates a word ID number? And there must a be a big list of all these word ID numbers somewhere right? 

Maybe these are from a Concordance?  

 

 

On 9/4/2019 at 7:53 PM, jwhess said:

Could they be numbered entries in the Insight books?  I typed #3999 and it brought up 10 reference in the Publication Index and 2 Reference in the Insight Book.

In every case, when you selected the reference listed and checked the highlighted choice, it took you to the Insight Vol 2 page 1088-1089 in the subject of "Castration".

 

When I have some time, I will check other numbers.

 

No one asked for this, but I went ahead and figured out what the last #number item in WOL is.

🥁🥁🥁🥁....
#249028 Better known as +

 

That's boring... The entry right before is "zz", the sound that the Hebrew character "זּ" makes. Much more exciting.

 

(yes... I did spend 5 whole minutes trying to solve this mystery...)