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	Freeform Searching
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Note: "Freeform" searches are no longer referred to as such on AustLII. What is described below is what occurs when you "search for any of these words" on AustLII.

The freeform search facility lets you to search over the AustLII databases in a fast and easy to understand way. It is designed for people who do not want to learn how to use the more sophisticated search facilities which are available via our standard search mechanism as well as for people who know what they're doing and want proper "conceptual" ranked searched results.

To do a freeform search, just enter a phrase, a case name, or the name of a piece of legislation. The search engine will then find materials which contain one or more words from your search and present them into what it considers to be the the "most important" to "least important" order.

If you don't have experience in conventional free text searching, the freeform approach is designed to give you a bit of a "quick and dirty" way of finding things. For people who are used to boolean searching, we hope that you find the new search mechanism to be a valuable addition to our existing search tools.

If you are interested in how the freeform interface works, Sino (our search engine) handles freeform searches as follows ...

1. After the preprocessing, Sino kicks in and deletes very common words and compiles an ordered list of search terms (in increasing order of how relatively frequently your search terms appear)

2. Sino then finds documents which contain at least one of your search terms and ranks them on the basis of (a) how many of the search terms appear; then (b) how many times the weighted search terms occur

3. The occurence information in (b) above is weighted according the relative infrequency of the term, as well as on the basis of how early in a document the term appears (to favour occurences in the title or in the start of documents)

4. The resulting list is displayed (including the number of search terms appearing as well as the weighted "occurence" score in square brackets after each title eg [3/234] means that the document contains 3 search terms with a weighted occurence score of 234).

Depending on your background, I guess at this point you are either saying that it sounds very complicated or very simple. From either perspective, the important point is that the thing appears to work and gives much more sensible results than most of the other freeform (aka "conceptual") engines. If you find it helpful, please send me some feedback (andrew@austlii.edu.au).

Hope that you enjoy using the new freeform search facility,

Best Regards,
Andrew Mowbray (AustLII Co-Director).