First Principles of Business Law

5. Finding documents using ‘search terms’

5.2. Using key words as search terms

Suppose you are looking for a particular document. It doesn't matter what it is - it could be a law report, an Act or another type of document. The document you want is somewhere in a database containing lots of other documents. You know enough about the document to assume it contains a distinctive word or phrase. This 'key' word may be part of the title of an Act or name of a case, or it may be a word that appears somewhere in the text of the document. By doing a search for documents containing your chosen key word, you should be able to retrieve the one you are looking for.

Look at the document illustrated opposite. You could search for it by using the key word 'justice' as the search term. The document would be found.

But you can see in the illustration that there are other documents in the database. Some of them may also contain the word justice. Your simple search term will find ALL the documents in the database containing the word 'justice' and you will probably end up retrieving more documents than just the one you want.

How a particular search term (like 'justice') will work can be illustrated diagrammatically.  Click here to see a diagram for this particular example.