Natural Language Searches & Boolean Searches Explained

This tutorial applies to our Fastcase Case Law search engine.  You have the choice of selecting a search by Natural Language or by a Boolean Search.

These rules also apply to the LawReader internal search engines.

How to Search
This advanced search engine supports two types of search requests. A natural language search is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question. After a natural language search, retrieved documents are sorted by their relevance to your search request.

A boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them. Examples:

If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Search terms may include the following special characters:

Words and Phrases

You do not need to use any special punctuation or commands to search for a phrase. Simply enter the phrase the way it ordinarily appears. You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:

apple w/5 fruit salad

If a phrase contains a noise word, the search tool will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.

Punctuation inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t. 1843(c)(8)(ii) would become 1843 c 8 ii (four words).

Wildcards (* and ?)

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

appl* would match apple, application, etc.

*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.

appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.

ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

Natural Language Searching

A natural language search request is any combination of words, phrases, or sentences. After a natural language search, the search tool sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words and search connectors like NOT and OR are ignored.

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