Advanced Search Methods
You can use a variety of advanced search methods to either expand your search or constrain it, narrowing the number of results Aleph returns.
By default, Aleph tries to find matches based off your keywords pretty broadly, returning matches that include all your keywords at the top, but Aleph doesn't exclude matches that include only one of your keywords. It just pushes down in the order of search results.
For example, if you type the keywords:
Ilham Aliyev
Aleph will return all matches that have the workd Ilham and Aliyev, and then matches that have either Ilham or Aliyev in them. This might be too broad for your needs.
However, you can explicitly tell Aleph to be more exact in how it determines matches.
If you want Aleph to only return matches that have exactly "Ilham Aliyev", then you should put quotations around those two keywords.
"Ilham Aliyev"
Sometimes a name can be spelled many different ways or even mispelled many different ways. One way to solve this problem is to simply type each variation in the search form:
Aliyev Əliyev Aliyeva Əliyeva
You might capture all the variations you want, but you also might miss some by accident. Another way to tell Aleph to look for variants of a name is to use the ~ operator:
Aliyev~2
What this translates to is: Give me matches that include the keyword Aliyev, but also me matches that include up to any 2 letter variations from the keyword Aliyev. These variations include adding, removing, and changing a letter. This includes Aliyev, of course, but also includes Əliyev, which is just one letter variation different, and Əliyeva, which is two letter variations different from Aliyev.
Using this operator with too high a number (greater than 3, for example) will cause slow searches and may return too many false results.
If you do not want to find a precise keyword, but merely specify that two words are supposed to appear close to each other, you might want to use a proximity search, which also uses the ~ operator. This will try to find all the requested search keywords within a given distance from each other. For example, to find matches where the keywords Trump and Aliyev are ten or fewer words apart from each other, you can formulate the search as:
"Trump Aliyev"~10
You can tell Aleph to find matches to multiple keywords in a variety of ways or combinations, otherwise known as a composite search.
To tell Aleph that a keyword must exist in all resulting matches, use a + operator. Similarly, to tell Aleph that a keyword must not exist in any of the resulting matches, use - operator.
+Trump -Aliyev
This translates to: Give me all matches in which each match must include the keyword Trump and must definitely not include the keyword Aliyev.
You can take these combinations a step further using the AND operator or the OR operator.
Trump AND Aliyev
This translates to: Give me all matches in which each match must contain both the keywords Trump and Aliyev, but don't return any matches that only contains just one of those keywords.
Trump OR Aliyev
This translates to: Give me all matches in which each match may contain the keywords Trump or Aliyev or both.
You can build on these searches even further like so:
+Aliyev AND (Obama OR Trump) -Georgia
This translates to: Give me all matches in which each match must contain the keyword Aliyev and must contain either the keyword Obama or the keyword Trump, but must not contain the keyword Georgia.
You can combine any of the methods supported by Aleph in many combinations to create some very explicit search rules. The complexity, of course, depends on your needs.
"Ilham Aliyev"~2 AND (Obama OR Trump) -Georgia
Aleph uses the search engine ElasticSearch in the backend, and many of the operators will work in the search form, but are more advanced. To check out what else is possible, see ElasticSearch's documentation.