The Sino Search Language

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This section provides a quick "how to" guide for searching on AustLII using our Sino search engine. If you need more information or want to find out more about Sino, see the full Sino documentation.

The Sino search language is rather cosmopolitan. If you have used one of the popular on-line legal database systems (or even if you haven't) you probably do not need to learn anything new. Most Lexis, Status, Info-One, (and for the non-lawyers, even C and agrep) style searches are recognised. This section is intended for people who need to understand exactly what Sino can parse. If you know "zot" about free text searching, see the next section. Otherwise, if you do not a a deep seated interest in Sino, you might want to quickly browse the relevant Emulated Search Languages section.

Sino Search Basics

When you do a Sino search, you as fundamentally searching for documents which contain some words or phrases. If you can come up with a phrase which you think is distinctive enough, just type it in and hit the return key! If you need to find documents containing more than a single word or phrase, things get a little (but not a lot) more complicated.

If you want more than one phrase or word to appear in the retrieved documents, put an and between them. For example, to find documents containing the phrase "moral rights" as well as the word "copyright", you would type: "moral rights and copyright" (less the quotes of course).

If, on the other hand, you want to find one term and/or another one, put an or between them. For example, to find stuff which contains the words "treaty", "convention" or "international agreement" you would search for: "treaty or convention or international agreement". If you wanted to, you could even put these two searches together - as in: "treaty or convention or international agreement and moral rights and copyright".

If you want to find two words or phrases which appear close to each other (for example, the parties to a case), you can use the near connector. If you wanted to find cases where Smith sued (or was sued by) Brown, you might type: "smith near brown".

The rest of this document is a fairly detailed description of how Sino searches documents. If your new to free text searching, you might want to go away and have a play at this point, and come back when you have some questions.

For more info see the full Sino documentation.