The
contact search is at the center of
ContactsLaw, appearing whenever details about a person or business are required in any capacity. As with other types of
searches, it can be opened by the system when a
contact is required for a particular field, or it can be accessed at any point in time by clicking the prominent Search button at the top of the screen.
The search window is divided into 5 major parts:
- Search term - One or more keywords that in some way describe the contact(s) you are searching for. These will be matched against a selection of fields (name, address, etc). You can determine whether to match all words in the search term, or any word.
- Search criteria - Determines which contact types to include in the search. The 3 supersets in bold will select multiple contact types.
- Advanced search - Allows you to further refine your search based on the follow advanced criteria:
- Fields - Determines which fields the keywords in the search term will be matched against. This enables you to, for example, search for all contacts on a particular street.
- Associated contacts - In the event that you know some piece of information about a contact, but are searching for another contact who may be related in some way to the first, you can select the types of relationships to traverse during the search.
- Role - You can limit the search to a particular role if you know the contact you are searching for (or one of its related contacts) appears in a particular role.
- Search results - After the search is complete, contains the contact(s) that matched the search criteria. Simple summary details are displayed, with entities being marked in bold. The results are listed in order of rank/relevance, best match first. Only the first 100 results are displayed.
- Contact creation - Following the ContactsLaw philosophy of 'search-before-you-(re)create', the contact search is the entry point into contact creation. Once the search has completed, the option to create or import a contact becomes available. Branch contacts can be created by right-clicking on an entity contact and selecting the 'create branch' option.
Search term
By default, the search will return partial and exact matches if they contain all of the words in the search term. You can change the match type to "any words" if the contact(s) you are looking for might not contain all of the words in the search term. Some words may be excluded from the search if they appear too frequently or are too short. You can enclose the term in double quotes to return only exact matches.
Similar-sounding results
Search results may contain similar-sounding results, shown in grey text. For example, if you search for "Smith" you may also get results containing "Schmidt". These results always appear at the bottom of the list.
Ranking
Results are listed in ranked in order of relevance to the search term. Factors which affect the ranking of results include:
Whether the term partially or exactly matches the field (exact matches are ranked higher)
The number of times the term appears in the field (repeated terms are ranked higher)
For similar-sounding results, whether the pronounciation is the same or similar (same pronounciation is ranked higher)
Whether the term matches the contact's middle name only (these results are ranked lower)
Whether the result is an associated contact (associated contacts are ranked lower)
Whether the search term was a contact/client number (the matching contact is ranked much higher)
The number of fields containing the search term (more fields matched results in a higher rank)
See also