It permits making more precise queries and also searching on fields such as Vol/Page. At the moment advanced search is only for the Sutta database. It cannot be used to search texts or dictionaries. However I expect to add these to the advanced search tool.
Naturally the advanced search will probably only be of interest to scholars, and will probably only be useful when you can’t make the default search produce relevant results.
The “division” and “language” drop-downs are not working for me with Chrome or Firefox on Windows 10. Tried it in Firefox safe mode to remove add-on variable but still no go. Chrome doesn’t have safe mode so I booted it in incognito which is the equivalent to safe-mode but still no go. Works fine in Internet Explorer.
Not a big issue, but something to be aware of down the line when you work on improving the advanced search.
edit: it appears that advanced search is not working at all for me on any browser—getting an error with every search
This is possible already in the normal legacy site search, I apologise for it not being documented. Like on Google you can use prefixes before terms to narrow down a search, for example:
uid:sn11.*
Would restrict the search to texts that the uid starts with sn11.
Prefixes you can try:
uid, acro, division, lang, root_lang, author, content and is_root:true
By default the search engine ORs components of the query together which works well for overly verbose queries but not for precise queries, if you add AND between search terms it will narrow down the search results, i.e.
That’s because “monastic code” does not literally appear in our AN translations so you get zero matches. Instead it tends to be translated as “discipline”, also there are no synonyms defined for “monastic” or “code”, for example we do make monk/bhikkhu/bhiksu synonyms (the same for nun) and a few other cases like nibbana/nirvana but that’s about the extent of the “meaning based” search.
Yup. It’s worth noting though that the search engine works the same way for both the legacy and modern site, so the prefixes I mentioned above along with AND can be used for advanced queries over the texts on the modern site too.
