ARKive Search Help

The ARKive search

To search ARKive, type in one or more key words into the white search box and press Enter or click the Go button for a list of results.

Select an appropriate tab to choose which results you are interested in - species information, video or images. The All option will search species information, video, images and all other pages on ARKive at the same time.

Search engine suggestions

Sometimes the search engine will provide suggestions to help you explore ARKive. These will be highlighted, as demonstrated below.

image: Screenshot of a Search engine suggestion

There are three types of suggestion:

  1. Synonyms. These are other words that have the same or similar meanings.
  2. Spelling suggestions. Your query might return extra results by slightly altering the spelling of a keyword.
  3. Keyword suggestion. These highlight particular ARKive pages which may be especially relevant to the keyword(s) you have typed.

Refining your search

Since ARKive only returns web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query.

Excluding words

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.

For example, the search lion -sea will return pages that mention lion which do not contain the word sea.

Automatic "and" queries

By default, ARKive only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. For example, to search for indian elephant feeding, enter indian elephant feeding.

"OR" searches

ARKive supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example, to search for the sooty albatross or the black-footed albatross, enter albatross sooty OR black-footed.

Does capitalisation matter?

ARKive searches are not case sensitive. For example, searches for vancouver island marmot, Vancouver Island Marmot and Vancouver Island marmot all return the same results.

Does ARKive use stemming?

To provide the most accurate results, ARKive does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. Rather, ARKive searches for the exact words that you enter into the search box.

For example, searching for pree or pree* will not return "preen" or "preening". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: preen and preening.

Phrase searches

You can search for exact phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search words. For example, the search bird-of-paradise is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes. ARKive recognises hyphens, slashes, full stops, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.

Feedback

We would like to hear from you if you have any comments or questions which are not addressed here or in our site-wide FAQ. Please email us at arkivesearch@wildscreen.org.uk

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