About the search

The following examples illustrate the functionality of the search engine on the ISWN database.

Full text search
Just type "John" to see an illustration the power of the underlying full text search engine.

Note that a filter avoids returning results that would be meaningless. Indeed searching for "Chateau" would trigger thousands of results but with little sense to retrieve and display all of these to the user. Therefore frequently occuring words with low information content are automatically filtered out by the search algorithm, which also limits the returned results to 100 records.


Multiple 'dimensions' of wine information
Typing "Cotnari" in ISWN wine search will point out that this word is both the name of a wine area and a winery, and also appears in the names of specific local grape as well as several wines. Note: Cotnari in Romania is the origin of the once world famous sweet white dessert wine Perl of Moldavia.

Typing "Margaux" will bring up the wine area in Bordeaux as well as wineries and wines from that area. However, Chateau Margaux is also the name of a winery hence this one appears first as the best match.


Special characters
The ISWN search engine allows for to search for words accomodating for hyphens and other special characters.
For example typing 'nuits saints georges' will find back Nuits-Saints-Georges, or similarly with Clos-de-Vougeot.


Search options
Choosing the option 'Extend search for similar words' allows you to use the full text search engine even if you are not sure about the exact spelling. This option will broaden the search to words that have a similar pattern. We advise to use this option in combination with the 'Smart filtering' option, and extend only when you can not find what you are looking for. Example: Typing "Mount Horrock" with both the Extend and the Smart filtering options on returns the Mount Horrocks winery in Australia.

The default option 'Smart filtering of search results' filters the many results often returned by the full text search engine by processing additional 'XML intelligence'. This increases your chances that the selection shown is closest to what you were looking for. The system will automatically display the most likely dimension of information. For example Example: Searching for "Chateau Margaux" will show the Winery tab, searching for "Pinot Noir" will display the Grape tab.