Help – how to use HuriSearch
The HuriSearch screen allows users to search for documents posted by thousands of human rights organisations world wide.
Two search modes are available: Simple Search and Advanced Search. You can toggle between modes by clicking the appropriate tab at the top of the search screen.
In both modes the HuriSearch screen consists of three main areas:
- The Search area, where you select the document collections and document languages to run a search in and type in your search terms.
- The Results area, where HuriSearch displays basic information about the documents retrieved.
- The Drill-down area where HuriSearch proposes criteria by which you can “drill down” in the documents retrieved (left column).
Search screen
The search screen allows quick searches with general search logic. Most users will be able to find documents easily with this screen.
Type your search terms in the Search box and click the GO button to run the search. Terms can be typed in any language. Phrase searching is available by inserting more than one term in quotes eg “extraordinary renditions” will find documents that contain both these words, in this order.
Search by type of publishing organisation
Check boxes allow you to select one or more collections for your search. By default all four are checked.
- NGOs: human rights NGOs and NGOs with a major human rights component.
- Academic institutions: universities, research centres etc.
- National human rights institutions: ombudsmen, advisory bodies, commissions of various kinds. National institutions complying with the Paris Principles adopted under the auspices of UNESCO are marked with PP after the organisation name.
- Intergovernmental organisations: official bodies with global or regional membership. Where mandates go beyond human rights, only the relevant departments are indexed.
Search results clustered by organisation
One of the originalities of HuriSearch is the way it displays the results from your searches: they are grouped together by source. This means all the pages retrieved from the same website are bundled together, displaying the most relevant document for each site.
This gives a chance to the websites of more NGOs to appear in the top search results. This is good for researchers because they can find more sources and get easy access to first-hand information produced by country-specific or theme-specific organisations. Often pages of lesser known organisations are lost on larger search engines, which give higher rankings to the more popular websites.
Results Drill-down
In addition to the features available in the drill-down area, results based drill-down is provided via the Find, Refine and Exclude links available on each result.
- Find: By clicking on the Find link HuriSearch will expand the query to find documents similar to the selected document in the complete collection.
Refine: By clicking on the Refine link HuriSearch will refine the query by returning only documents similar to the selected document within the original results list - Exclude: By clicking on the Exclude link HuriSearch will refine the query by returning only documents different from the selected document within the original results list.
- More hits from this site: In the HuriSearch results list, only the most relevant page from each organisation is listed. By clicking on “More hits from this site”, you will get a list of all documents from the particular site that match your search criteria.
Search within results
This function allows you to further refine your search. When this box is checked HuriSearch lets you redefine search criteria which will be run within the documents retrieved in the previous query. This allows you to zoom in – step by step – to the most relevant documents.
Left column drill-down area
In the left column, various drill-down lists allow you to “zoom” into documents retrieved during your search according to a number of criteria. For each drill-down list, you can click on “More” to see the full list (or the first hundred results, if more than one hundred hits match your query) or “Show Less” to reduce the list.
Countries
HuriSearch indicates the countries where the organisations are based that published the documents retrieved in your search (with the number of retrieved documents in that country in brackets). This is NOT determined by top level domain (for example .ru or .ch), or by analysing the IP. This list is sorted by frequency (the country in which most documents were published appears first).
Organisations
HuriSearch indicates the Organisations on whose sites the documents retrieved are published. This list is based on information indicated to us by the organisation when submitting its site, or following research by HURIDOCS. This list is sorted by frequency (the organisation that has published the largest number of documents appears first). Please note that this does not necessarily mean that the organisation indicated is the author of the document retrieved, as some websites reproduce content originally published by others.
HURIDOCS Terms
This allows you to drill down your results list using a broad list of human rights terms established by HURIDOCS. HuriSearch analyses search results and tells you when a HURIDOCS index term is mentioned, so you can easily identify the most prevalent human rights themes. This list is sorted with the most commonly found term first. Click on any term to get the most relevant pages for it.
The list of HURIDOCS Index Terms was developed by HURIDOCS and published in its Micro-thesauri: A Tool for Documenting Human Rights Violations.
Eight language versions of these terms are currently implemented in HuriSearch (English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Korean). The drill-down list will be in the language of the interface being used, even if the documents themselves contain the terms in one of the seven other languages.
“Children (170031)” means 170031 documents in the results list contain any of these words: Children, Enfants, Kinder, Niños y niñas, Дети, الأطفال, 儿童, 아동.
Open this spreadsheet to see the HURIDOCS terms and their translations in eight languages. Persons and organisations willing to contribute translations into other languages are very welcome to contact the HURIDOCS Secretariat at info[at]huridocs.org.
Keywords
HuriSearch instantly analyses the documents retrieved in a search and extracts keywords found in them. Keywords are not checked against a control list and may contain irrelevant terms. These keywords have proven to be very useful for guiding users to search terms they may not have thought of. The words found most frequently in the results documents are listed first.
Search syntax
If you want to look for documents matching one single term, just type that term, for example: torture.
If you type two terms, HuriSearch will look for documents that contain any of these two terms. For example trafficking children will give documents which contain either “trafficking” or “children”. The list will begin with documents that contain both terms.
If you want to find documents that contain all terms, put a + before the each of the terms – for example, +trafficking +children.
If you want to retrieve documents that contain one term but not another, put a – before the second term – for example, trafficking -children.
If you look for a particular phrase, put it in quotation marks – for example “freedom of expression”.
Advanced Search Screen
The advanced search screen allows powerful searches with advanced search logic and linguistic tools. In addition to the features of the simple search described above, the advanced search allows you to do the following:
