All about the search tool 🔍

In this post:

• 1. Research documentation

• 2. Advanced search to refine your searches

  • A. Implicit operators

  • B. Explicit operators

  • C. Search in specific fields

• 3. Examples

• 4. Multilingual searches

• 5. Search suggestion

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1. Research documentation

A. Case sensitivity

All search queries are treated as case-insensitive, no distinction is made between lower and upper-case letters, even when the terms are in quotes. 

B. Accents

All search queries are accent insensitive, no distinction is made between a letter and its diacritical versions (with an accent, umlaut, or cedilla), regardless of the case used. 

C. Punctuation

The majority of punctuation marks are disregarded: this includes full stops, commas, semi-colons, colons, etc.
Only inverted commas and parentheses are taken into account. 

D. Exact phrases

To search for an exact string of words, enclose it with the quotation character ".

The rules on case, emphasis and punctuation apply even to terms enclosed in inverted commas. 

This means:

Punctuation characters are also ignored in an expression between inverted commas.

Exclusion from search results

Forecasts are visible in the search results only if they have been published within the last 24 hours, while for agendas, the period is one month. Beyond that, they lose their relevance and do not appear.

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2. Advanced search

A. Implicit operators

An "AND" is implied between search terms.

B. Explicit operators

You can combine words to get a more precise result. When the words AND, OR, NOT are recognized as operators, they change their appearance when you type in the search bar:

• All words that must be present are separated by an AND.

  For example, power AND solar will find all documents that contain both the words "power" and "solar".

  Spellings recognized as an AND:

  • English: AND, French: ET, Spanish: Y, Dutch: UND, Portuguese: E, Arabic: و

    The key combination "CTRL+ALT+a" ("CTRL+option+a" on a Mac) generates an AND operator

• If at least one word in a list must be present, separate the words in that list with an OR.

  For example, solar OR nuclear will find all documents that contain either the word "solar" or the word "nuclear" or both.

  Spellings recognized as an OR:

  • English: OR, French: OU, Spanish: O, Dutch: ODER, Portuguese: ONDE, Arabic: أو

    The key combination "CTRL+ALT+o" ("CTRL+option+o" on a Mac) generates an OR operator

• If a word should not be present in the retrieved documents, precede the word with the operator NOT.

  For example, nuclear NOT weapon will find all documents that contain the word "nuclear" but not the word "weapon".

  Spellings recognized as a NOT:

  • English: NOT, French: SAUF, Spanish: NO, Dutch: NICHT, Portuguese: NÃO (with or without an accent), Arabic: إلا

    The key combination "CTRL+ALT+n" ("CTRL+option+n" on a Mac) generates a NOT operator

    In addition to the NOT operator, the "-" character attached to the beginning of a word or phrase in quotation marks can be used to indicate that documents containing that word or phrase should be excluded. Unlike NOT, the "-" character cannot be used before a parenthesis.

• Put a query in parenthesis: allows you to put operators on all or parts of a search in a specific order.

  (iphone AND (13 OR 12)) NOT apple finds documents that include the word "iphone" associated with "13" or "12", and that do not contain the word "apple".

  Interpreting a query without parentheses

  When a query contains more than two words, it is always preferable to indicate the order of the operations to be carried out by grouping words and operators in parentheses. Without parentheses, the order of grouping implicitly retained will simply be that of reading from left to right (or from right to left for an entry in Arabic), and the search will be automatically rewritten with parentheses.

  Examples:

  • President OR title=Russia AND China will be interpretated as:

    and will retrieve documents containing the word "President", or documents with the words "Russia" and "China" in their title— and it may also include documents that contain all three terms.

  • President AND title=Russia OR China will be interpreted as President AND (title=Russia OR China) and will find documents containing the word "President" and either having the word "Russia" or the word "China" in their titles.

C. Search in specific fields

By default, the words you enter are searched in all fields of a document: title, keywords, caption, body text, launch, etc.

It is possible to define specifically in which particular field the words entered should be searched, by prefixing the word with the name of the particular field, separated by "=".

If you need to find several words in the same field, you can group those words.

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3. Examples

• You can mix the spellings of the operators. This entry will search for documents that contain either "election" or "vote" or both, and that also contain either "presidential" or "local" or both.

• 
  will find documents that contain the word "cricket", but that doesn't have the IPTC category "cricket".

• this entry will search for documents that contain "travel", "tourism" or "mass tourism", but not "immigration" or "covid", and that contain the words "governmeny", "minister" or "department".

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4. Multilingual searches

It is important to differentiate between the language of the search terms and the language of the documents identified by this kind of search.

The search field is preceded by a drop-down list where you can choose the language in which you enter your search terms. It is automatically set to the language of your browser, English being the default language if your browser's language is not supported. 

All documents corresponding to this search are identified, regardless of their nature and language. You can then filter them using the language panels. 

For example, if you search for terms in Arabic, you will get documents in all languages. Depending on your search, it may even be the case that no Arabic documents are returned and you will only get documents in English, for instance! 

Example:

• Your search language is "en." You search for the term "Sweden".
  You will find documents in all available languages that contain the word "sweden" or the translation of the word "sweden" from English to these languages. For instance, documents in French that contain the word "suede", in Spanish that contain the word "suecia", etc.

• Your search language is "fr." You search for the term "Suede." (French for "Sweden")
  You will find all documents in English that contain the word "suede" and all the documents in the other languages that contain the translation of the word "suede" from French to these other languages. Therefore depending on the case, you may find different documents.

--> Click on one to automatically relaunch the search.

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5. [New✨] Search suggestion

Speed up and refine your searches with search suggestions

Search suggestions help you quickly find relevant content by displaying structured suggestions in real time, as soon as you start typing in the search bar.

They rely on two complementary types of suggestions:

• Named entities (people, organisations, places),

• Photo keywords (new ✨), dedicated to the AFP photo archive.

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A. How does it work?

1. Automatic Suggestions : As soon as you access the search bar, 10 of the most frequently cited entities from the last 30 minutes of AFP production (as well as partner content using the same named‑entity system) are suggested.

2. Real-Time Refinement: Suggestions are progressively refined by combining your input, the search language, and recent trends.

3. When you click on a suggestion, it is added to the search bar as a chip (rounded tag) and the search is automatically launched.

4. Once an entity has been selected, you can continue typing additional keywords, add Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR), or combine multiple entities to further refine your search.
   

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B. Named entities

Named entities refer to people, organisations or places (city, country, territory, department, province, region/state, point of interest, or location without a specific subtype) from the AFP reference database.

Each entity is associated with a unique identifier, used across AFP content to facilitate indexing and searching within the large volume of information produced by the Agency.

Why use named entities?

• Comprehensive search
  All variants, aliases, titles and nicknames are automatically taken into account.

  • Kate Middleton → Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess of Wales, Princess Kate

  • Emmanuel Macron → President Macron

  • Pelé → Edson Arantes do Nascimento (full name)

  • Twitter → X

• Homonym disambiguation
  Clear distinction between identical terms with different meanings.

  • Washington → Washington, D.C. (city) or George Washington (US president)

  • Jackson → Michael Jackson (singer) or Andrew Jackson (US president)

  • Paris → the city of Paris or Paris Hilton

• Tolerance for typing errors
  Correction of spelling mistakes and typos, including more complex errors (multi‑word inputs or letter inversions).

  • “Zelhensli” may suggest Volodymyr Zelensky

  • “Jhn Kennedy” is corrected to John F. Kennedy

  • “Teh White House” becomes The White House

  • “Macr B” returns Brigitte Macron

C. New ✨: Photo keywords

Search suggestions now also include photo keywords, in addition to named entities.

Photo keywords are based on a controlled vocabulary used during the human indexing of the AFP photo archive.
They allow users to search images by visual content or theme, rather than by text alone.

• Access to a consistent and relevant photo corpus

• Grouping of images sharing common metadata

• Support for synonyms, in both French and English

Examples

• ILLUSTRATION AND POLICE INVESTIGATION → View photo results

• ARMY UNITED STATES AND IRAQ WAR (2003–2011) → View photo results

• VOTE AND France AND ILLUSTRATION → View photo results

• CHILD AND SMARTPHONE AND MOBILE PHONE → View photo results

• FEMALE EDUCATION → View photo results