Military Periscope supports Boolean search requests, which are groups of words and phrases linked by connectors such as AND and OR that indicate the relationship between them. Words that do not have AND and OR connectors are treated as phrases.

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Military Periscope sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents in which each word appears in your search request (the more documents in which a word appears, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in relevance calculations.

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

• arm* would match army, armies, arms, armory, etc.
• *arm* would match alarm, unarm, army, etc.
• arm? would match army and arms but not armies.
• a*my would match amy, army, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for MERCATOR will also find MEERKATZE and MARJATA.

To ask Military Periscope to search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Example: #MERCATOR

Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching.

A numeric range search is a search for any numbers that fall within a range. To add a numeric range component to a search request, enter the upper and lower bounds of the search separated by ~~ like this:

• "F-"15~~17

This request would find any document containing a number between 12 and 17.
Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).
For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers).