SiteSearch: search the Sydney Mathematics & Statistics web site

To search documents in the School's local Web site, enter one or more ``phrases'', then start the search.

Each ``phrase'' should be an (unordered) set of one or more words which you would hope to see occurring together in the same sentence in documents returned by the search. Words you would like to see in the same document but not necessarily in the same sentence should be put in different phrases. A ``word'' may either be all alphabetic, or a string of between 4 and 8 digits.

Some indexed documents are accessible only from within the School.

Additional details

Words are reduced to a stem by removal of common suffices before searching is performed, so in general you need not worry about singular versus plural and other grammatical distinctions. Overly frequent words and stems are ignored. The search is not case-sensitive.

For each document matched, the following are reported:

• how many sentences in the document contain each phrase
• the document title.

And yet further details...

Our SiteSearch is superior to a Google search (with "site:maths.usyd.edu.au"), because we can search pages that are accessible only locally, that Google cannot reach.

However in some other senses our SiteSearch is an abject failure:

• it skips/ignores entities like more-or-less (hyphenated) or Windows10 (not fully-alphabetic or fully-numeric)
• does not handle multi-word entities like more or less or Windows 10
• does not know that Windows 10 and Win10 are the same thing
• searches only HTML and plain-text files, does not (yet?) search PDFs or other "binary" files, nor does it handle images.