We're piloting a new way to search the Nestor bibliography: Nestor Smart Search, now available in beta.

The regular Nestor search is — and remains — the right tool when you know exactly what you're looking for: a specific author, a known title, a particular year. Smart Search is built for the opposite situation: when you have a topic in mind but aren't sure of the exact wording a title might use, or you're exploring a subject you don't yet know the literature for. Think of it as the difference between looking something up in a card catalog and browsing the stacks — both are useful, just for different moments in your research.

What makes it different

Rather than matching only the literal words you type, Smart Search tries to understand what a search is actually about. A search for "dog burial," for instance, can surface directly relevant studies on canine sacrifice and interment practices even when their titles don't use that exact phrase — including titles in other languages. Results are ranked by how closely they match the meaning of your search, not by date, so you may see a foundational older work ranked above a more recent one. That's expected, not a bug.

A note on how it works

Smart Search runs entirely on our own university server. No search terms or bibliography data are sent to any outside AI company or cloud service, and it isn't a chatbot — it doesn't write, summarize, or generate anything. It uses a small language model purely to judge which existing bibliography entries best match the meaning of what you typed.

What to expect from a beta

This is an early release, and it has real limitations:

• It currently searches titles only — not authors, dates, or journals. A search like "Bennett Pylos" won't find Bennett's work the way the regular search would; try just "Pylos," or a topic Bennett wrote about, instead.
• It's sensitive to capitalization — "Pylos" and "pylos" can return different results. Capitalizing proper nouns as you normally would tends to work best.
• Coverage and ranking will keep improving as we test it against real searches.

The regular Nestor search isn't going anywhere — Smart Search is an addition, not a replacement, and both will remain available.

Try it

Nestor Smart Search (Beta)

We'd genuinely like to hear how it goes — what worked, what didn't, and what felt surprising. If a search gives you an odd or unhelpful result, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..