Announcing the New Perseus Lookup Tool

May 11, 1999

The Perseus Project is pleased to announce new searching facilities for our digital library and the first in a series of improvements to the Perseus architecture. The Perseus Lookup Tool unifies searching across images, sites, buildings, artifacts, secondary articles, and primary texts. For example, a search for Rhodes or Segesta will find not only Perseus catalog entires for those sites, but also entries in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, coins, vases, and images. The query "Who was Pericles?" will find occurrences of Pericles, and the alternate spelling Perikles, in titles of Historical Overview sections, in image captions, in Perseus encyclopedia entries, and as the title for a text. The query "Hercules and the lion" will find Hercules, Heracles, and other alternate names along with the word lion.

In the preceding examples, the lookup tool only searched for the non-function words. (About 200 words are too common to be worth searching for.) By electing to search for an "Exact Phrase", you can restrict the number of results to those exact words in that order. By searching for "Any Keywords", you can broaden your searches and perhaps broaden them too much. All Perseus texts and catalog entries are now filtered on key phrases from the new lookup tool instead of single words alone.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.