Targeted Search help
Hello.
I've never done much with advanced searching, but know I need to learn more in this area. The few times I've tried it in the past didn't turn out too productive, but I would like to improve my knowledge in this area. I wanted to do some basic research on Jeremiah the prophet, so I turned to Logos to see what it could do for me. After a little poking around the wiki, I found a simple search parameter I thought might help:
<person Jeremiah>
The results were not what I was hoping for. I received 'pages' of returns showing me family tree diagrams, followed by several timeline diagrams, then on to maps, media for pages and pages. What I was hoping to find was dictionary & encyclopedia type entries giving me biography and overviews of his Life and ministry. I'm sure this is just because my search is lacking, but I'd like to know how to improve it.
Thanks!
Comments
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A few thoughts
danwdoo said:<person Jeremiah>
I don't know if you were using this extra string but "<Person Jeremiah (prophet)>" would be better. But it will still get you the lists of things you mention.
It is searching through every resource you have to find where Jeremiah the prophet is tagged and returning every occurence.
If you want to restrict your search to dictionaries / encyclopedia you can either set up a Collection containing these resources or specify them when constructing the search - click the "All Resources" button, enter "type:enc" and select the top option
That will restrict the search to resources of that type - as they may not all be tagged, I'm just using the simple search on "Jeremiah"
This returns all articles in these resources that mention Jeremiah.
If you want to restrict this further to those articles that are about Jeremiah - click the "All Text" button, open the "Search Fields" section and select "Heading Text"
which will give you something like this:
danwdoo said:What I was hoping to find was dictionary & encyclopedia type entries giving me biography and overviews of his Life and ministry.
Having said all of that, for the actual thing you are looking for I would start with the Factbook Tool - and access Dictionary articles from there:
Hope this helps, Graham
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danwdoo said:
What I was hoping to find was dictionary & encyclopedia type entries giving me biography and overviews of his Life and ministry. I'm sure this is just because my search is lacking, but I'd like to know how to improve it.
Search isn't the best tool for these results. You should be using Factbook instead. Search is best for finding details. Factbook is best for overviews of people/places/things/doctrines/etc.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Both collections and the factbook give me much better results. I thought that doing a person search would give results from the factbook, but clearly it wasn't. I hadn't thought about collections for this type of search. Have a lot more organizing to do.
Thanks!
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danwdoo said:
I hadn't thought about collections for this type of search. Have a lot more organizing to do.
But doesn’t Factbook give you what you need for this?
I don’t understand why you need to set up Collections for it
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danwdoo said:
I thought that doing a person search would give results from the factbook, but clearly it wasn't.
There will be a link to Factbook if you "Search Everything". It won't show if you "Search All Resources".
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Graham Criddle said:
But doesn’t Factbook give you what you need for this?
I'm thinking about experimenting with different collections that are geared towards different types of articles and results that might be helpful. Never done it before so we'll see if it turns out to be helpful or just more legwork.
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Fair enough - thanks for that.
Hope it is really helpful
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