This second post in the CADIndia Advanced Search: A Guide series, will focus on keyword(s).

In most cases, the keyword(s) that you’ll enter into the search box will be the most important aspect of your search query; we suggest that the keyword(s) be a topic/concept/theme/ institution.

Some examples of keywords(s): secularism, judiciary, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech etc.

It’s best to avoid entering speakers, speakers referred to, article numbers, countries referred to, or dates of debate as keywords, as these have their own filters on the right-hand side of the advanced search page.

Ideally, you should enter a keyword(s) and then use the filters to narrow down your search results.

Exact Phrase vs Any Word

You can choose two ways in which your keyword(s) is processed: exact phrase or any word.

For ‘Republic of India’, exact phrase will return those paragraphs that have ‘Republic of India’ either in the text or the tags.

However, the any word option splits the constituent terms of the phrase. So, ‘Republic of India’ will be split into ‘Republic’ ‘of’ and ‘India’ and paragraphs which have any of these three terms either in the text or the tags will be returned as a result.

For single term words like ‘India’, exact phrase and any word options process the search term in a similar fashion: paragraphs that contain ‘India’ as a text hit or a tag hit are returned as a result.

AND Search

A useful type of search to perform is the AND search when you want to read those paragraphs which correspond to two or more keyword(s): For E.g. you may be curious if Constituent Assembly debated the idea of freedom of speech through the prism of tax or vice versa.

To do an AND search you should first type in ‘freedom of speech’, press ‘enter’, go back to the search box, type ‘tax’ and then press ‘enter’ again. In this way, the search engine processes the query as an AND search and will return those parts of the database where freedom of speech and tax were discussed together. You can do the same with ‘uniform civil code’ and ‘women’, ‘partition’ and ‘federalism’, and so on.

Pre – Selected Keywords

Below the search box, you will notice a number keyword(s) organised under headings like ‘fundamental rights’, ‘federalism’ etc - these are pre-selected keywords.

If you are not looking for anything specific in the Advanced Search, these pre-selected keywords(s) give you a range of concepts/ideas/themes to choose from and explore. You can click on one of the terms (or more) and the keyword(s) will automatically be entered into the search – without you needing to type them out – and results will appear.

In the next post, we will focus on how best to use filters in the Advanced Search