Michael, I was being a little sarcastic when I said that. I can't pretend I understand it although I probably would if I had the time to work through some example searches, although I'm not sure, the Verity system Mudcat uses has been known to fail to find items on simple searches for reasons no one I'm aware of have been able to explain - doesn't make working out whether your search is right or wrong on more complicated searches when you know there may be bugs...

What follows is a combination of experience and guesswork based on the documentation. Keeping things simple, the documentation says it supports the wild cards * and ? (and others).

* Matches anygroup of characters so Mud* should match Mudcat and Mudcatters

? Matches a single character so Mud??? should match Mudcat but not match Mudcatters. Ma?y shoul match Mary and Many, etc.

The default search appears to be for a phrase (last thats how it works when I try it) so searching for Mudcat Gathering would find Mudcat Gathering but would fail to find Mudcat Spring Gathering.

A way of searching for 2 words or phrases is to use boolean operators.

AND Requires both keywords or phrases to be present, e.g. Mudcat AND Gathering would find Mudcat Gathering, Mudcat Spring Gathering, and any other document that contained both words.

OR Requires either keyword/phrase to be present, e.g. Mudcat OR Gathering would find all documents containg Mudcat and All documents containing Gathering.

Coming back to the wildcards, you could use them with the boolean operators above, e.g. a search for Mud* AND Max should find documents containing Max and Mudcat as well as documents containing Max and Mudcatters, etc.

Quotation Marks, as you will have noted above, certain words such as AND have special meanings, to avoid them being interpreted in this way, use quotes, e.g. if you wanted to search for the phrase Max and Mudcat, use "Max and Mudcat" words or phrases within quotes may be joined by the boolean operator in the same way as unquoted words/phrases.

Anyway, I think that's enough and hopefully that little bit works. Sorry I haven't got the time to test it or put together better documentation. Maybe someone knows of a well written plain English help document for the Verity system on the internet?

Jon