Instructions and Details

• Simple query enter a single word or phrase to match.
  • Click [Find] to start searching.  Exact matches of your search terms will be shown highlighted in context.
  • Apostrophes may be embedded in your search terms: don't care.
  • Hyphens are treated as optional, so web-page matches web-page, web page, webpage.
  • Wildcards are not supported.
  • Leave query fields blank for random pages in the language selected.
• Advanced query enter one or more words or phrases to match in the left-hand box, one per line. 
  • Specify match any or all search terms in a single document (terms are ORed and ANDed respectively)
  • To further focus your search, specify words or phrases that must / may not occur on webpages (include / exclude).  These filter terms are not shown in the results.
  • Include search terms are logically ORed (i.e. any one of them matches) and exclude terms are ANDed (i.e. none may be present). 
  • For example, a search for bass could include terms like player, music, clef, sing and exclude terms like fish, boat, hook to clarify which homograph is meant.
• Click the Options tab to specify how many webpages and matches per page, amount of context to show and countries to search. Your settings are saved in cookies and restored on your next visit.
• WebAsCorpus search can find texts in any of the languages on the Web, not just the ones listed in the dropdown box.  See the language details next to the language field.
• Live Search supports a maximum of 1000 matches per query. While the option to retrieve up to 500 pages at a time does exist, that may not be possible as the server terminates the script after 5 minutes.  300-400 matches per time is a good practical limit; you can fetch the rest of the available matches via the "continue this search" (top of page) or "more > >" (bottom) links.
• Occasionally Live Search is unavailable for a few seconds or minutes, or the WebAsCorpus server is overloaded: be persistent!
• Note also...
  • the results include some document statistics – total number of words and paragraphs, average number of words per paragraph as a rough indication of "textiness"
  • documents can be downloaded individually in text format with UTF-8 encoding
  • when the entire results page has been loaded, links to download a zip file of all HTML and / or text files retrieved appear at the top

Other options