Introduction to the ArchivalWare™ Search Modes
ArchivalWare™retrieves documents using the sophisticated Excalibur RetrievalWare search engine. You begin your search using one of three modes:
Pattern, Concept, or Boolean. You can additionally perform field, proximity, wildcard, truncation, date and date range,
and other more sophisticated searches. 
PATTERN SEARCHING. This mode is similar to how most popular web based search engines work. Keywords are searched in the metadata and full text of the document taking into account spelling differences, missing or mistyped characters, and OCR errors. By utilizing a sophisticated internal voting and rating scheme that considers a number of different features of the pattern instead of just character pairs, ArchivalWare™can find the words missed by weaker, approximate searches based at the character level. Results are returned in a relevance ranked list. When documents are retrieved the search words are highlighted in the text of the document.
CONCEPT SEARCHING. Performing a concept search retrieves synonyms and other related words on all search words. As an example, a search for “international commerce” will find documents that discuss “foreign trade” or “global markets.” A process called "disambiguation" is applied to the query to ensure that ArchivalWare™ returns only the conceptually relevant documents for that particular query. Results are returned in a relevance ranked list. When documents are retrieved the search words are highlighted in the text of the document.
BOOLEAN SEARCHING. Boolean queries can be entered using the traditional Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. Because there is no ranking, the default is to sort documents in chronological order (based on their addition to the database, not the date of the document). Be aware that the most relevant document could appear anywhere on the returned list.