Using Hit Lists You are here: AustLII >> Technical Library >> Teaching Materials >> Online Tutorial >> Using Hit Lists

Now that we know how to get some results we need to know how we can customise our hit list and then what to do with it. You should already know The Basics about Searching.

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Chose between ranked results lists, word counts and number of results;

2. Navigate between "hits" within a document;
3. Be able to refine searches by looking at hits in context.

Different Hit Lists

Every search you conduct results in a "hit list" -- a list of documents that match your search criteria. You can customise the hit list, by chosing various options on the search form.

Ranked Results

You've seen ranked results before -- it's on by default when you do a search. You can chose to turn this off, in which case the results come back in "database order" -- they are grouped together by database (so that all the High Court decisions appear together, for example). Actually, this isn't always true. You can't to relevance ranking off in an "any of these words" search. That's because the volume of results you generally get are useless if not ranked.

Exercise:

1. Go to Full Search Form. Elect to search legislation only, using "all of these words".

2. At the bottom of the screen, under Additional Options are some checkboxes. Turn off the "relevance ranking" box.

3. Type in a search query (use "banana industry" without the quotes) and click Search.

4. Look at the order of results, as well as the look of the hit list. Note that documents are grouped by database -- all the "numbered acts" from the Commonwealth appear together.

5. Click Back on your browser, go to the bottom of the search form, and turn relevance ranking back on. Then click search again and compare the results.

The hit list is displayed (expect around 213 matches). Note that documents with the word "banana" in the title appear at the top. Let's examine a "hit" in detail:

1. BANANA INDUSTRY PROTECTION ACT 1989 - SECT 14 The banana industry fund [100%]
   (Database: Queensland Consolidated Acts; 1 January 1989; 2548 bytes)

The first item is the number 1. It means nothing more than "this is the first document in the list." It is followed by a link to section 14 of the Banana Industry Protection Act 1989. If you clicked on this link, you would be taken to the section of that act. You could then click on Context links to see where "banana" appears in the document.

After the title comes the relevance ranking. The first will almost always read "100%". That means that this document is the best match. All other relevance rankings are expressed relative to this one.

Next comes the database this document is found in -- in this case, it is the Queensland Consolidated Acts. A document date followed by document size follows.

Documents are considered more "relevant" if:

• Your search terms appear often in the document (called "word density");

• Your search terms appear towards the start of the document (called "word placement");

• The more search terms that are present, the more likely the document is to be "relevant".

For example, if we searched for any of the words: banana 16E, those documents with both "banana" and "16E" would appear towards the top, while those documents with only one term would appear lower down ("16E" is a section number).

Exercise:

1. Go to Full Search Form and set up to search all legislation databases (any of the words).

2. Enter the boolean search banana 16E and press Enter.

3. Which document is at the top? Why?

Documents with both search terms appear first, especially those which have the two terms appearing towards the top of the document. The ranking formula can be complex, so use the percentage ratings as a guide only.

Word Counts

Another option on the search form that you may have noticed was "show word counts". This is the option that lists the "words found" on the search screen and shows you how many documents contain that word for your search. Clicking on a word in the list conducts a search for that word. The word counts also report words that were ignored (common words) and words that may have been misspelt.

You can toggle the display of word counts on or off by setting this option. Word counts are not available in an "any of these words" search, due to the optimisations used to make that search as fast as possible.

Number of Results

By default, SINO will only return the first 50 matches. Regular users may be used to AustLII returning the first 100. If there are more than 50 results, there are two ways to get the next set:

1. Return to the search screen with the Back button, and increase the number of results to return at a time to 100 or a higher number; or

2. Stay on the search results screen, and click the 'page number' for the next set of results. After your first search you will see the line "Page 1 of" and then a list of numbers. Click "2" to get the second page, "3" to get the third, and so on.

Summary

That's the end of this lesson, and of the lesson block Using AustLII. The next block is Advanced AustLII, which contains two lessons on advanced search techniques (still under development).

In this lesson we learned about the different formats in which we can receive our results, and how to activate them. Search results are an important customisation that can help you find the documents that you think are relevant, not just the ones SINO thinks are relevant!