search logic, characters, wildcards for android library app?

Discussions around the Android version of the Gospel Library application.
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spencer.penrod
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search logic, characters, wildcards for android library app?

#1

Post by spencer.penrod »

Greetings, All.

I am having difficulty understanding what, if any, special characters/terms/etc. can be used for performing more sophisticated searches in the Gospel Library app. For example, if I wanted to search for "Bruce R. McConkie" AND "Book of Mormon" BUT NOT "Marion G. Romney" (or something along those lines), is there a way to do that? I cannot seem to find any documentation for the boolean operators/wildcards/etc. for the app.

Would appreciate any guidance.
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sbradshaw
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Re: search logic, characters, wildcards for android library app?

#2

Post by sbradshaw »

No, Gospel Library doesn't support advanced search operators or wildcards.

As you type in the search bar, relevant search suggestions will appear. These are shortcuts to perform an action or jump to a certain place in the app. If you want to do a full search, type your query, then tap the Search button on the keyboard. In a full search, the app looks through all of your installed content and your personal notes. It will find exact and variant words – for example, if your search includes “choose,” it will also find results for “choosing” and “chosen.”

Using multiple keywords will find instances where all of the keywords appear on the same page, within 10 words of each other. There's no way to specify words to exclude. If you search for a phrase, the app will search for exact matches first, and put those at the top of the results. If you put quotation marks around the phrase, it will do an exact phrase search. There's no way to specify multiple phrases to include or exclude.

For a more advanced search, my recommendation is to use Google, with site:lds.org/study included in your query. When you tap a link from Google search results, you'll be given an option to open the content in the Gospel Library app. Google has 20 years of experience refining their search results, and has a much larger set of data for relevancy decisions.
Samuel Bradshaw • If you desire to serve God, you are called to the work.
spencer.penrod
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Posts: 9
Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2017 12:32 pm

Re: search logic, characters, wildcards for android library app?

#3

Post by spencer.penrod »

Ok, that's very helpful. Thanks for the explanation.
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