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Simple Overview

If you have never used an Internet search engine before you can have SINO do most of the work for you. A search engine is a computer program that presents you with a list of documents that match the criteria which you specify. You specify the criteria in the form of show me all documents that have the words X, Y and Z in them. You can narrow the criteria, for example: show me documents from Western Australia with the words X, Y and Z in them.

The important thing to note is that the SINO search engine will return to you a list of documents that contain the words (or phrases) that you specify. Therefore you must choose your search words carefully. The best words (or phrases) to choose are those which are unique or particularly distinctive and are, of course, relevant to the subject matter of your query.

The SINO search engine will relevance rank the results by default, which means that the best matches will appear at the top of the list. You will obtain the best results when searching for unique or distinctive words or phrases.

After choosing the unique or distinctive words for which you wish to search, type them into the search form. Now decide if you want to see documents that contain:

Make your selection on the search form.

Finally, decide whether you wish to search over all of the CommonLII databases, an individual database or a group of related databases (eg All Case Law Databases) and then make your selection(s) from the database list.

When ready, press Search. A list of documents will be returned to you. You can use Back on your browser to return to the search screen in order to refine your search.

Two additional search options which you will notice on the search form are using autosearch and this Boolean query. These are explained below.

Using Autosearch

If you choose the "using autosearch" option, you do not have to specify what type of search you want to carry out. The SINO search engine will analyse the words for which you are searching and attempt to apply the correct search type for you.

Unless autosearch recognises your search as one of the above searches, it will default the search type to an any of these words search. Do not forget that you can override autosearch by explicitly choosing another search type.

Boolean Searches

When you do a SINO search, you are searching for documents which contain some words or phrases. If you can come up with a phrase which you think is distinctive enough, just type it in, set the search method to this Boolean query and hit the ENTER key! This will find all the documents containing the exact phrase you have entered. If you want to find documents with more than one word or phrase, you use the Boolean operators.

If you want more than one phrase or word to appear in the retrieved documents, put an and between them. For example, to find documents containing the phrase moral rights as well as the word copyright, you would type: moral rights and copyright.

If, on the other hand, you want to find one term and/or another one, put an or between them. For example, to find documents which contain the words treaty, convention or international agreement you would type: treaty or convention or international agreement. If you wanted to, you could even put these two searches together - as in: treaty or convention or international agreement and moral rights and copyright.

For more in-depth information see the Search Operators Chart and Common Words List (words that are not searchable).

Proximity Searches

If you want to find two words or phrases which appear close to each other (for example, the parties to a case), you can use the near proximity operator. If you wanted to find cases where Smith sued (or was sued by) Brown, you would type: smith near brown.

The near proximity operator finds two words or phrases within 50 words of each other. For information on the other proximity operators available, see the Search Operators Chart

Emulated Search Languages

If you have used one of the popular online legal database systems (or even if you haven't) you probably do not need to learn anything new. Most Lexis, Status, Info-One, (and for the non-lawyers, even C and agrep) style searches are recognised. See Emulated Search Languages for more information.

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