Searching GulfLINK with Texis

We've gone to great lengths to make searching GulfLINK simple and effective. For more serious research, however, you may need to use the advanced features of the Texis search engine, described below.

Contents: Search Options - How to Enter Your Search - Database Organization

Search Options

The following options and settings are available on the search page. The items on the left are fully functional, so you can experiment with actual searches as you read about the features.

Multiple Entry Fields/Logical Operators
Click on this image to display an alternate search page with additional entry fields for multiple search terms, with constraint settings for each. For details, see Multiple Term Entry below.

Search for:
Search String Entry Field
Enter the word or words you want to search for. Use "double quotes" for phrases, and asterisks (*) to match any unknown characters or words. For details, see How to Enter Your Search below.

Submit
Click on this button to start your search.

Data Sources:
GulfLINK
Army
Navy
Air Force
Marine Corps
DIA
CIA
Joint Chiefs
Central Command

Data Sources
Select one or more data source. Keep in mind that more data sources mean a longer search time.
The vast majority of the files on GulfLINK are recently declassified documents from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and other sources. You may search any or all of these sources independently.
Note: The GulfLINK data source includes everything except the recently declassified documents. The other data sources comprise the recently declassified documents.

Proximity (within):

Proximity

If your search string contains two or more words, you may specify how close together each of the terms of your search string must be for a match to occur. The default is a sentence.
Consider the following sample paragraph:
The department has launched an extensive research effort to understand what happened during the war, investigating incidents that may have exposed U.S. troops to chemical weapons or other unknown substances, and assessing the health of Gulf War veterans.
Searching for department exposed with Proximity Within Line selected would not find this paragraph because the words do not exist in the same line. Selecting Proximity with Paragraph (or Page), however, would find the paragraph.

Prefix Expansion
Suffix Expansion
Prefix and Suffix Expansion
You may want to search for words regardless of prefixes and suffixes. For example, searching for engage will find instances of the word engaged and engaging as well as disengaged. You can turn prefix and suffix expansion on and off independently.
For more details see The Morpheme Stripping Routine.

Match:

Match Exact or Percentage Spelling
By default, the exact spelling of your search terms is used as you enter them. However, if you select one of the percentage options, your search terms will match words that have nearly the same letters in them. One use for this is when searching for proper nouns that have either unknown or multiple spellings. ``Qadhafi'' is an example of a name which has several different accepted spellings. In addition, someone for whom English is a second language can much more successfully search for things he or she cannot spell with this option. Finally, this can be useful in instances where there are document imperfections such as typographic errors or OCR oddities due to poor quality scanned images.
See also approximate matching.

Ignore/Match Synonyms
This will allow matches on synonyms of the words in your search string. For example, if you search for "war" with Match Synonyms selected, documents with words like combat and battle will be found.

Sort by:
Sort Order
You may have the search results sorted alphabetically by title, by release date (only for recently declassified documents), and relevance.
Note: Sorting by relevance weights the words by their uniqueness in the document set being searched. This means that infrequent words are weighted more than common words.

Show:
Items to Show
You may choose to have the search results page show just the title or both the title and the description. The description is simply the first 230 or so characters in the document, usually providing a simple summary.

Return: hits maximum per page
Return Hits per Page

This is the number of hits per page to be displayed. Actually you only need to choose the minimum number as the rest of the hits will always be available to you in the result page.

How to Enter Your Search

Simple Terms

Your search can be as simple as a single word or a string (multiple word). For example, if you want references to do with vaccine, type in the word vaccine. An English word will match occurrences of forms of that word in both lower and upper case, regardless of how it was entered. In other words, the default keyword search is case insensitive.

The asterix (*) may be used as a wild card. For example, searching for The mayor*authorized would return a hit containing a string like this: The mayor of New York has authorized. The wildcard may span up to 230 characters in a document.

Phrases

A literal phrase can be searched for by placing "double quotes" around it. Without double quotes, each term in the phrase is searched for independently. For example, searching for "arrived at the FROG-7 deployment" returns documents containing one or more of the terms arrived, FROG-7, deployment and area. (Note that the words "at" and "the" are ignored. However, searching for "arrived at the FROG-7 deployment area" returns only documents containing the exact phrase arrived at the FROG-7 deployment area; documents containing arrived at FROG-7 deployment area will not be returned because the word "the" is missing.

The proximity option can also be used to narrow your search. The default is search within a paragraph. Strings can also be search within a line, page, and within a given number of characters.

Multiple Term Entry/Logical Operators

This image takes you to another search page that resembles the main search page but with multiple keyin fields for searching for multiple words with different constraint on each one, an option not available on the main page.

For example one might want to search the database for: war, kuwait, chemical and not the word bomb. Additionally, one might refine the search terms to look for:

war - and its synonyms
kuwait - must be included in the hit
chemical - and its synonyms

This can be accomplished by typing each word in the provided box, and choosing one of the six options: for each entry.
NOTE: An additional option for this search method is located on top: Search for: . This will add a logical constraint to your search by either searching the occurence of all these words in the file (option: all), or any of these words in each file (option: any), i.e the file having the word war or its synonyms only will be returned as a separate hit, the file containing the word chemical and kuwait only, will be returned as a hit also and so on ....

Database Organization

The GulfLINK search database is divided into two major categories:

The recently declassified documents, subdivided according to data source ( Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, DIA, CIA, Central Command, and Joint Chiefs of staff).
Everything else on the GulfLINK web site, including News, Case Narratives, FAQs, and the Library.

Within each data source (Army, Navy, etc), the recently declassified documents are further subdivided according to release date. To get a better idea of the structure of the recently declassified documents, you may browse the collection.

Note: By default, all data sources are selected for searching. However, you may wish to de-select some of these for faster results. In particular, searching using the approximate spelling option can take much longer if all data sources are selected.

Return to Texis Search Form

	Multiple Entry Fields/Logical Operators Click on this image to display an alternate search page with additional entry fields for multiple search terms, with constraint settings for each. For details, see Multiple Term Entry below.
Search for:	Search String Entry Field Enter the word or words you want to search for. Use "double quotes" for phrases, and asterisks (*) to match any unknown characters or words. For details, see How to Enter Your Search below.
	Submit Click on this button to start your search.
Data Sources: GulfLINK Army Navy Air Force Marine Corps DIA CIA Joint Chiefs Central Command	Data Sources Select one or more data source. Keep in mind that more data sources mean a longer search time. The vast majority of the files on GulfLINK are recently declassified documents from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and other sources. You may search any or all of these sources independently. Note: The GulfLINK data source includes everything except the recently declassified documents. The other data sources comprise the recently declassified documents.
Proximity (within):	Proximity If your search string contains two or more words, you may specify how close together each of the terms of your search string must be for a match to occur. The default is a sentence. Consider the following sample paragraph: The department has launched an extensive research effort to understand what happened during the war, investigating incidents that may have exposed U.S. troops to chemical weapons or other unknown substances, and assessing the health of Gulf War veterans. Searching for department exposed with Proximity Within Line selected would not find this paragraph because the words do not exist in the same line. Selecting Proximity with Paragraph (or Page), however, would find the paragraph.
Prefix Expansion Suffix Expansion	Prefix and Suffix Expansion You may want to search for words regardless of prefixes and suffixes. For example, searching for engage will find instances of the word engaged and engaging as well as disengaged. You can turn prefix and suffix expansion on and off independently. For more details see The Morpheme Stripping Routine.
Match:	Match Exact or Percentage Spelling By default, the exact spelling of your search terms is used as you enter them. However, if you select one of the percentage options, your search terms will match words that have nearly the same letters in them. One use for this is when searching for proper nouns that have either unknown or multiple spellings. ``Qadhafi'' is an example of a name which has several different accepted spellings. In addition, someone for whom English is a second language can much more successfully search for things he or she cannot spell with this option. Finally, this can be useful in instances where there are document imperfections such as typographic errors or OCR oddities due to poor quality scanned images. See also approximate matching.
	Ignore/Match Synonyms This will allow matches on synonyms of the words in your search string. For example, if you search for "war" with Match Synonyms selected, documents with words like combat and battle will be found.
Sort by:	Sort Order You may have the search results sorted alphabetically by title, by release date (only for recently declassified documents), and relevance. Note: Sorting by relevance weights the words by their uniqueness in the document set being searched. This means that infrequent words are weighted more than common words.
Show:	Items to Show You may choose to have the search results page show just the title or both the title and the description. The description is simply the first 230 or so characters in the document, usually providing a simple summary.
Return: hits maximum per page	Return Hits per Page This is the number of hits per page to be displayed. Actually you only need to choose the minimum number as the rest of the hits will always be available to you in the result page.