Tips for Searching

The tips on this page, can assist you in focusing your search to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with the basic query language used in searches and assist you in using the full power of the search engine.

• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query type: key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word. For example, type: sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not the Net, write the following query:

  surfing AND NOT the Net

• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:

  Abbott OR Costello

  This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search engine to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query:
  
  "system near manager"

  When quotation marks are used, the search engine will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:
  
  system near manager

  This choice searches all documents for the words system and manager.